Here's a re-post of my AIBU forum post from earlier this week 
"I'm a Search Engine Optimisation consultant (known in the business as an SEO).
It's basically a specialised form of IT consultant - online (digitial) marketing to improve the performance of a website or a web page in search engines and/or to users.
So my job essentially is to promote our clients' websites. With lots and lots of research:
- What are they doing wrong on the site?
- What are other people doing better?
- How can they exploit this or that better?
- What are people looking for which is relevant?
- How do they attempt to find it?
- Viral marketing / social media
- How to market online to ABC demographic..
- And so on.
It involves conversion rate optimisation (getting more people to sign up to XYZ, more financial transactions, more interaction - whatever - all measured in statistics and goals). It also involves competitor analysis and lots of keyword/trend anaysis.
So, a bit of technical wizardry, a bit of marketing, a bit of psychology!
And the lesser areas I cover are the management of paid link building budgets, online ad revenue reporting/budgeting, as well as the occasional bit of copywriting and content management.
My degree was in artificial intelligence at uni, but my background is in software development (4 years working for a bank - yawn- and then another 2 years working freelance - fun but unstable income) but I also have marketing qualifications which lead to me convincing one of the top London agencies hiring me on a probationary basis.
I'm currently working on a project which involves some ad hoc troubleshooting work for a medium sized clothing retailer (women's fashion - it's a collection of independant boutiques) who just launched their new website 4 months ago, but their (utterly shite) web developer has made a few mistakes with the coding and design of the website which means it has significant visibility issues in search engines, as well as some usability flaws.
We've been hired to get their visibility back up (and to improve upon) pre-launch stats - I love it!
I love seeing the result of my work. For example, we did a 2 week project in September last year for a local government arm (mini health website) to consult on a viral marketing campaign with most of its budget online - they do the same thing every year (it's seasonal - like the anti drinking ads on TV at Christmas) - I'm sitting here reading through visitor and interaction levels for the last quarter's year on year figures, and we're sitting at an increase in visitor numbers in the thousands of percent... and people are (apparently) staying on the site for an average of 4.5minutes longer.
Gooood times!"