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We do some SEO work ourselves, but we run three businesses here, all of them make decent amounts of money. Its not worth us to pull a partner out, have him learn SEO, implement it, etc. We'd rather pay someone that knows what they are doing and let the partners do what they're good at.

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If you don't take the time to at least learn the basics and what people are going to do for the money you pay them, my guess is that you'll be an attractive target for more snake-oil salesmen. Once you've learned that, you could pretty much do things yourselves, handing off make-work things to contractors for significantly less money.

We have a pretty good idea on SEO. One of the businesses is a web marketing firm focused on Copy Writing (he's a copy writer). So, we do know the basics and can ferret out BS, but he/we believe good SEO takes time and effort. Neither of which he (or anyone else) has any interest in. Why spend weeks learning and then months implementing SEO, when you can pay someone to do it? His time is more valuable than the presumed cost of paying someone (copy writers also make serious money).

Another good reason to know some of the basic stuff is to make sure that someone does not happily blackhat you straight in to pagerank '0' territory.

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