What should an SEO do?

[BigAlReturns]

There are hundreds and hundreds of companies and individuals out there who offer SEO services, and there seems to be a massive discrepancy, not only in quality of results, but in what they do as well. So, what is the general consensus here as to what an SEO's job is?
My opinion is that an SEO should be seen as a consultant more than anything else. Their job should be to offer advice on how to increase rankings, advice that is then acted upon by the site owner, or someone else under their employ. For example, if as an SEO I recommend someone start a blog, to increase unique content on a site, and draw in links, I do not think it is necessarily my remit to install and/or write articles for this blog. While I may offer these services to a client, I don't think it should be a necessity that every SEO has the know how to do this.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that as a consultant, you should be educating your client as to how they can take their site forwards without requiring your advice every step of the way. Although this might seem counter-productive to continuing business with them, this way you offer the best value for money, and with that you can expect many more referrals, and as people realise your value, increase your rates.

Anyway, enough of my ranting, what do you all think?

[ryanhellyer]

What an SEO does and what it should do are often two different things.

And SEO should be doing whatever they can to optomise your site for search engines. However many (most?) simply rip off their clients as they either know little/nothing about SEO or are using old school techniques which will eventually get them banned from the indexes, albeit with some short term jumps in rankings.

And SEO should be working on optomising for various key words, ensuring the HTML for each page is correctly laid out and uses appropriate semantical techniques and that semantics are used to emphasises the most important keywords on the pages. They should also be persuing any reciprocal links which can be legitmately obtain in a no risk way (to avoid penalties from search engines).