The more you have is better. But this question is very vague. What aspect are you talking about. Blogs? Other sites?
There is only so much you can learn and know for a fact, but most of the learning needs to be done by you... testing every now and than when you can. That's how you evolve.
I am one of the SEO geeks that think it is VERY important. SEOs should understand IR (indexing and retrieval) like a web developer knows HTML/PHP and so forth... Having a technical background in SEO can make a TON of difference and is often why some of us are better than others ;0) To this day (nearly 10 years in) I am still studying search and testing/researching theories...
Honestly, from what I've accomplished right now. It's not much. You just need to know what you're doing.
No, if you have knowledge, you don't need to rely on luck and random chance. Who the hell is going to rely on luck for their livlihood? Even professional gamblers inform themselves about the odds.
I dont know as much as some of the members here, But I do know theres alot of different aspects around SEO, so obviuosly the more you know about these the better chance of ranking high you have. SEO also takes effort, not just knowledge, well thats my opinion anyway
You should have a good understanding of web development and know some moderate server configurations.
SEO experts should have knowledge of xHTML.Before i started SEO i was php developer developing mods, when SEO came everything change , im currently working with phpSEO software.Hope its gets successful. "The More you have the more power" - hope u understand............... I dont take SEO as job its just way of my work where i get success.Yes it requires experience within many websites, such as - business,classifieds,forum,blogs,affiliate & product websites.
technical knowledge is very important in seo. I only realized it when I was hired by a property management company. When I applied as seo specialist I only know basic html, but the website that I'm going to optimize is built in PHP, so I need to ask some help from my friend who knows PHP. I'm one year now with the company, aside from seo, I also became a web developer(only wordpress).
SEO is an art and I think you need to know that two different websites will not have the same result even if they're using a similar strategy. And I think technical knowledge is quite important but it's definitely not the most important thing when you want results.