Receptional_Andy - 4:26 pm on Dec 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

The death of SEO is a perennial topic, but for "white hat SEO", perhaps throw in a few topics of importance to SEO that you wouldn't do at all were it not for wanting better Google rankings. Think title construction, meta elements, robots exclusion, schema and rich snippets, sitemaps...

And of course, there are many other areas that aren't, perhaps, "pure" SEO, but many people do them for that reason, or with a view to imrpoved search performance - canonicalisation, accessible/semantic mark-up, logical site hierarchy. You can even throw the whole anchor-text-relevancy thing into the pile without too much concern - those focussing on anchor text are often doing so because they've heard it's a search thing.

I don't intend those to be exhaustive lists, by any means.

It's "awkward" being a consulting SEO, because you often have to advise on usability, accessibity, server administration and other best practices that don't fit a "pure SEO" mode. But even when you take those things away, there's plenty that a typical site can do - or does - because Google sends such a huge proportion of traffic - and not because they would do them anyway as part of running a good website.