Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO."[1]. Patrick says a similar thing somewhat less confrontationally - "People treat SEO like it is black magic, but at the core it is very simple: Content + Links = You Win."[2]
They're both 100% correct, but both gloss over most peoples understanding of "content" or "brain damaged web design". Read all of Googles guidelines[3] and ensure you're not making any obvious mistakes. Make sure you know what keywords you're targeting, and test and iterate and re-research as a continual process. Make sure you've got analytics in place so you can see what's going on and measure the responses to changes you make. Keep in the front of your head that (for most websites) the goal of SEO is not really "more traffic", it's "more conversions". Learn about goals, goal funnels, and conversion rates. Learn about A/B testing (read _everything_ Patrick/patio11 has generously given the HN community about this).
That's the "easy" bit.
They're also both possibly not strongly enough making the point that on-page SEO is the easiest part of the job - way too many people desperately hope that guessing the right keywords and changing their titles, meta tags, headings, and body text will shoot them to the top of the search returns. It's not that easy, unless you've got unique keywords or are intentionally targeting super-specific long tail keywords, you're going to spend more time link building than tweaking your own website.
In my opinion, unless any "SEO plan" you're being offered includes a description of an ongoing process for link building, they're only addressing the easiest part of the problem. (And yes, I think _that_ part of the problem is ripe for automation, and I suspect probably _has_ been automated by the very successful people).
What if the other guys do "Content + Links" as well(seeing how this has been the general consensus SEO silver bullet for 5+ years now), we all win?
Link building is to on-page optimization what marketing is to product development.
You can conquer worlds with crappy products and brilliant marketing, but the reverse is also true. Doing both with passion = highest chance to win.
Depending on the type of site and how many links you already have, fortunes can be made by clustering your data/pages better, naming your stuff differently, changing your internal linking etc.. .
"And yes, I think _that_ part of the problem is ripe for automation, and I suspect probably _has_ been automated by the very successful people"
You have gotten it backwards. A lot of link building (read: blog spam, paid bloggers, paid articles, link brokers etc..) has become automated, far beyond the level of automation of on-page optimization.
They're both 100% correct, but both gloss over most peoples understanding of "content" or "brain damaged web design". Read all of Googles guidelines[3] and ensure you're not making any obvious mistakes. Make sure you know what keywords you're targeting, and test and iterate and re-research as a continual process. Make sure you've got analytics in place so you can see what's going on and measure the responses to changes you make. Keep in the front of your head that (for most websites) the goal of SEO is not really "more traffic", it's "more conversions". Learn about goals, goal funnels, and conversion rates. Learn about A/B testing (read _everything_ Patrick/patio11 has generously given the HN community about this).
That's the "easy" bit.
They're also both possibly not strongly enough making the point that on-page SEO is the easiest part of the job - way too many people desperately hope that guessing the right keywords and changing their titles, meta tags, headings, and body text will shoot them to the top of the search returns. It's not that easy, unless you've got unique keywords or are intentionally targeting super-specific long tail keywords, you're going to spend more time link building than tweaking your own website.
In my opinion, unless any "SEO plan" you're being offered includes a description of an ongoing process for link building, they're only addressing the easiest part of the problem. (And yes, I think _that_ part of the problem is ripe for automation, and I suspect probably _has_ been automated by the very successful people).
[1] http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.htm... [2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani... [3] the pdf linked here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-s...