Hmph... I don't know Jon, I think you're largely correct, but at the same time, I cannot help but feel that its an oversimplification of the matter. The wikipedia page you cited is hardly comprehensive. This list, on the otherhand, is the information I think one must be familiar with if you decide to charge clients for anything related to search engine optimization: http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Too often I see good content that is practically worthless because no one bothered to write descriptive page titles; or, worse, they've forgot to use actual header tags, or filled their page with tons of unnecessary javascript and bulky layout tables. I've found that the majority of problems with search engine ranks have nothing to do with the content, but rather the markup.

Finally, and I think this is where the SEO industry really could start delivering a valuable service: often good content does not match the keywords that people use when searching for the service or product. I think to some extent, good SEO should go farther than optimizing markup, and taking care of submissions... stuff like that I do anyways at no extra charge -- good markup is my job. HOwever, identifying the key words that people will likely use when searching for a product or service is an untapped mine of gold in my opinion... and its hardly voodoo, its simply an application of basic marketing that is applied effectively to SEO. My two quickly written cents...

Nick, I don't disagree - but I think a lot of the SEO advice relates to the kind of good structure you would want to have anyway, no?

My experience is that the vast majority of firms and consultants that call themselves search engine optimizers are basically what you suggest, they are like the crooked mechanic who takes advantage of unsuspecting customers who know nothing about cars, and overcharges as though it's "part of being in the business". One time I got a chance to look at the advice that an SEO consultant had sent a client (my guess is that the consultant was payed in the thousands range); I call selling such advice a scam. It was literally as simple as "put this many metatags in every page, write page titles out like this, and match your keywords with headers -- oh and send our check to the following address". That's the sort of advice I'd give clients anyways for no other reason than I don't want to see their website fail because I kept my mouth shut.

However, the large point I wanted to make was that the really powerful strategies -- at least from my perspective as a web programmer, are far beyond the scope of a typical job, and compensation for building out a design using the best practices. For example, if I was coding this blog's layout, and wanted to maximize its SEO potential, I'd code it with your center content first in the page source, and use an odd combination of margins and floats to get the sidebars to display on opposite sides. However, in a typical contract, I won't do that, because it typically will cost an extra two hours, and customers would rather pay less, than get the (with three column layouts that change has raised my traffic somewhere in the 15-20 percent category). That's just one example, but there are multiple considerations that are like that one in which optimzing the page requires coding it "the hard, obscure, and unusual way..." as opposed to the agreed upon way that all high-quality coders would do it. Moreover, even knowing how to say, code a three column layout with center content on top is not common knowledge among most "professional coders". Sadly, even knowing the difference between and tags is pretty rare... most professional coders have been doing this since the 90's, and simply don't care that they're still coding as wrong as the browsers of that era read the code (this actually seems to result in new comers having a distinct advantage in the field.). Anyhow, we'll talk more about this sometime, but the point is that there are concrete strategies and services which go beyond good content and markup that will produce very visible results, and are of extrondinary value to most customers -- but they cost too much time on the programming and sanity end to consider "included in the package". IMHO, at the very least.