Remember Adam Smith’s description of the amount of labour that goes into making matches… the old ‘division of labour’ thing. A match requires someone to chop down the tree, someone to mine the sulphur for the tip, someone to create the chemicals, someone to create the machinery to shape the match and so on… It would be foolish to think that one person can make the perfect match without all this outside expertise.

Websites are no different. Someone who’s great with visual concepts might not understand how a website is even put together. And the person putting the website together might not know how Google works. And then the owner of the site might blunder about spamming the internet because – hey! – they’ve got a business to run and don’t have any frame of reference for buying links or adding content to their site properly.

So SEO is just the study of these things and the application of them to a website – not some kind of meta-criticism of web design or business.

Where I think it becomes unethical is when SEO experts make it seem like what they do is extremely complicated and could not be done without their help. I’m a writer, and I started seeing SEO on everyone’s resume’s, so I thought, I better learn what this is all about. I bought a highly recommended book and I was shocked in the first 15 minutes I had it how common sense it was (and how much I already knew). I guess my point is….for someone who has a clue about the web SEO should be friendly advice. You can find most everything you need to know here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

For someone who has no clue, and isn’t willing to learn they may be a better candidate for SEO services. But if they aren’t the type to really be clued in as to what they are doing online then it may be a wasted effort. Because as Derek said “You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.
It’ll take time. A lot of time. But it works. And it’s the only thing that does.” If they aren’t willing to put the work in then they’ll never get very far.

Sorry if a bit rambling or dense – time is so tight that editing cycles get nixed.

HE PICKED THE WRONG WORD.

He should have have said “SPAM” is not a legitimate form of marketing. “SPAM” is poisoning the web.

I fight, fight, FIGHT to educate against spam on the web. It pisses me off and I take it reeeal personally that tacky tactics like that rub off on my mission to help people leverage exceptional online content even more by making it search-friendly.

Email marketing has similar backlash: we all detest spam emails, but no one can deny that a ingeniously crafted, opt-in email campaign does nothing but improve customer loyalty.

SEO can be used for good or evil. Derek’s ranting against the evil while completely missing the value that legitimate SEO brings.

(His “under the hood” paragraph is also a messy misinformed miasma of reverse-engineering, but I digress…)