SEO Is Bunk

I find it ironic that SEO firms are drawing moralistic lines in the sand. As I have stated my controversial opinion here before, SEO is bunk. "White Hat", "Black Hat", whatever, it is bunk. A bold statement that is sure to anger many here as it has in the past. While certain techniques will boost you in the results for this or that search engine, the implied promise of many SEO firms is to increase traffic to your site with the subsequent implication that this will increase your business. It really doesn't matter how much traffic you get to your site, if the visitors don't buy and don't return. On top of that, the little known fact that most visitors do not find your site via a search engine. Don't get me wrong, being number one for a generic search term is a good thing. However, it is not the only thing. I also like to point out that doing a search for "search engine optimization" (minus the quotes) returns over 7 million hits in Google. Close to the top in both Google and Yahoo is seoinc.com. So, I really see only one clear winner as far as SEO firms are concerned. What's their "secret"? Spam and links. Yep. The term "search engine optimization" is found about 64 times in their source code for their Home page alone and there are 18,000 sites linking to them. However, there are also other sites that are high in the results that are completely the opposite of this. My favorite real-world example is: