I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck... I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primari

I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck... I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer. The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place. I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality: 1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down 2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it 3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size. Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master. Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise. whew All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.