SEO is as safe as any career in marketing. If people are selling products online, and you can stand out as an expert it's secure.

What you'll make just varies too much. There are individuals doing it for free on forums, making a few $ here and there, professionals making a decent livng, and firms making millions. Your income will depend on your skill and ability to get customers.

Google has killed seo service career(every time a link gets reported the website gets devalued in google SE) so better try some other alternative.

it means that seo is not safe as a career? and i think many still practicing seo.

Yeah thats right.
I think the way google wants us to do it is very fair. It puts all websites on a level playing field, rich or poor.

I hate it when SEO experts ask you for a link to www.xxx.com site and want to put your link on a page on another site in the middle of woop woop. (aussie slang)

The funny thing is I offered a link exchange to a website that has a higher page rank than me and they sent me an email saying no... Then they asked if they could buy a link on my site?
I was going to give them a reciprocal link for free, but now they want to buy it.... WHY?

additional question
give your opinion about which is the safest and best career option in seo and web designing...

Thnx

You should not limit yourself like that. A good webmaster should be able to design nice looking pages with proper meta tags, titles, ect and have the know how to build links and modify domain paths, meta tags ect as the content changes. In todays world you cant make a whole lot of money unless you can make dynamically generated pages, unless you are a designer or SEO person working for a team and have others do the php, asp, or whatever dynamic page machine they like.

My advice is: learn it ALL, and then you will have more customers and have more to offer, more to charge for, and dont force the customer to go shopping elsewhere. Some things you can learn on the job, if you get stuck, come on forums like this one or search the web.

hello to all
i read all post which is posted here .but i think seo career is safe.and google proves most helpful for our seo career.coz of google we can search everything whatever we want .i dont agree with you .

SEO is very much a legitimate career, I got a call the other day from a national SEO firm trying to sell it to my company (we weren't interested). Google has started enforcing HOW you offer SEO, but that doesn't mean it's not doable.

I agree with finance though, if you're involved in web design too, it makes sense to be a web designer who knows SEO. Then you can get income from both sides.

IMO the combination of that two skills will really help alot to make that chosen to be safer