A recent EI post starts with this quote:

"..they would consider the benefits of training up someone in-house to manage the ongoing SEO effort.
It is not, as some would have you believe, rocket science."

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Standard SEO methodologies aren't particularly complicated, on the contrary they can appear deceptively simple, just look at the number of designers who now offer SEO :-)

The complexities come from knowing where the various red lines are and how to deal with them, and since the SEs do their best to obfuscate them, it's not something you'll pick up in an afternoon.

Might be easier if SEO WAS rocket science, at least then it would be clear and precise :-)