As far as the part that didn't make sense to me, I was reading it wrong. I get what he's saying now. I was a bit tired last night.
I've done a bit of SEO work at my job. I wouldn't say that's one of our specialties but we can do it. We just go through a list of stuff, meta tags, alt tags, page titles, re-write copy to get more keywords in, make sure flash has alt content, clean the code and make it standards compliant, rename files with better names, etc.
Usually it's just a one off job though. No upkeep or anything after we're done, which it seems like this guy's wanting. Maybe we don't do it correctly at work.
I'm not afraid of turning him down if I don't know enough. That's why I'm asking. I thought that what I've been doing was the norm.