IMHO, the only folks that wouldn’t agree with you are the snakeoil salesmen in this game. Every single reputable SEO I know would tell you in a heartbeat that what they do isn’t so advanced you couldn’t learn to do it (and then do it) yourself, its just that you don’t have the time or the experience, so you pay someone else. Just like a plumber.

You sound a lot like me, in that I don’t trust folks that promise me that they can perform magic. If the plumber uses a tool that I can get at the hardware store and uses it with hands that look just like mine (no extra fingers or anything) then I’m just that much more inclined to do it myself next time there’s a problem.

SEO, decent SEO, is pretty much the same damn thing.

Good luck to you, and great blog.

This is not to say there are a small percentage of firms that do good work – I meet some of the elites at WebmasterWorld and SES and generally I’m impressed. However my experience hiring a very well known firm was a waste of time (I got my money back because I had insisted on money back agreement in writing and threatened to blog about the experience). In fact this experience taught me that I was very “advanced” in SEO even though I don’t do that kind of consulting – I had to keep explaining some of the new SEO stuff to them rather than the other way around, and much of their advice and tactics in 2005 were, like, so 2004! They had applied good basic SEO but it was nothing special, and contrary to what many SEO folks claim there are *very, very few* special tricks to use anymore. This last point is important because it’s the typical “scam” for both real and sham firms to suggest to people that they have secret sauces. Generally tactics that can lead to abnormally high rankings can quickly revert to penalties.