Spammers, Evildoers and Opportunists : that's how Internet consultant and blogger Derek Powazek considers SEO consultants. He goes on by explaining that SEO experts are enticing companies and individuals to create content for Google instead of their real audience - for him, "SEO is poisining the Web". He concludes with his "One True Way" to make websites: make something great - tell people about it - do it again.

An interesting read for those interested in Search Engine Optimization 'philosophy'!
http://powazek.com/posts/2090

Update [14/10/09]: Danny Sullivan posted a response to Derek Powazek, explaining that there are bad SEO consultants exactly as there are bad cops or bad businessmen - but that a SEO-oriented mindset is very important in web development, illustrating his point with 3 real-life examples...

Search Engine Optimization is a technique to improve the volume or quality of traffic coming from search engines to a web site. It mainly consists in optimizing the content and source code of the page to increase the relevance to specific keywords and to have a better ranking in search engines' results page.

Image: webconfs.com