There are too many SEO cowboys out there trying to make fast money for little/no work, and most people do not understand what good SEO involves. Hence many have

There are too many SEO cowboys out there trying to make fast money for little/no work, and most people do not understand what good SEO involves. Hence many have bad experiences and the industry as a whole gets a bad name. This is unfair as there are some SEO practitioners, but even from my limited experience they have been few and far between. We have to remember as hackers, startups, or computer/web literate people, we should be doing most of this ourselves, but for most people (SMEs or mom & pop with their website/ecommerce store) this will be foreign to them and hence the market for (good?) SEO practitioners. Whereas bad SEO practice (using link-farms, link-baiting, paid-for directories) will certainly harm your site (Google penalize against sites that do this and there are many cases of sites paying for SEO only to see a early rise followed by a sharp fall later), good SEO at the basic level can significantly help.