Depends who you want to work for too, ie: enterprise company, government, small startup.
If you want to be one of the best at PHP spend countless hours practicing it. Learn to read production level code, maybe contribute to some massive open source projects to get a handle on how professional programmers operate. Everything from following a naming/indentation standard to requesting your patches for review before commiting to tree. Learning something like CVS, version change control and maintaining a code base. Of course mastering the language, and knowing OOP principles.
I think for a highly,highly skilled programmer, you will have a salary, but you will also do work on the side. Your knowledge of SEO/BHW will eventually pay off, yes you might work for a fortune 500 by day for 60-80k/year but whats to stop you from running your own websites by night for further profit?
It is also very interesting to work for a startup company. It is risky, you take lower pay in trade for shares in the company. If your product takes off you can get rich beyond your wildest dreams, but it can also flop too, or be somewhere in the middle. You will "wear more hats" as they say in a startup. I worked in one as a junior, under the senior dev/JV partner who was the CTO of the company. There were between 5-8 people working at a given time. We hosted our own servers,had a server closet, so the CTO or us the juniors would not just code, but build hardware, install OSs and hosting software, communicate with our net supplier, code, research and more. I found it fun to have more responsibility, in a huge company they try and strip you of responsibility and make your job very targetted.