Mike Moran mentioned that Search Optimization works well even when you don't do anything to optimize a website - which is actually … not true of a lot of other kinds of promotional work you often have to do to get the word out.  According to Mike:

"….The truth is that content publishers do less work to be found in search than to be found any other way. Yes, Bill Hunt and I wrote a whole book of search marketing tips for those that want to do the work. And if you want to do the work, you'll get an edge. But all of that work is optional. If you don't do any of the work, some content publishers (and blogs are a great example) will get about the same traffic. If you use the right words in your titles and your copy, that's the most basic thing to do. Most bloggers do this stuff automatically."

All of this was a response to Tom Foremski who poses the question "Is Search Broken"?

"….If the search engines are so great at doing what they do, then how come we have to do all of the above? (note: he mentions a lot of stuff in his original post)

I resent the fact that I have to create all this content describing my content–the search engines should be creating this "metadata."

And Mike Moran told Tom to:

"…..stop doing the work. If you don't want to do it, then don't. I bet you won't notice much difference. But to say that search is broken because it is too much work is silly. Search actually works quite well without publishers doing any work at all, which is unlike a lot of the other ways of getting attention."

I feel the same way… when I see sites getting more search rankings and traffic, I could easily explain it by the natural growth of people using Search Engines (without the sites having to do anything special).  In fact, I have clients who haven't changed their sites much, or at all in the last year and yet they received double the traffic from Google this year than last.  Why?

On the other hand, when we do SEO Work, often we're taking our best guess on what the Engines want and how they'll treat it.  I think it was Computer Scientist, Andre Broder, who used to work for IBM, btw, who said something like …"you can control your content but you can't entirely control what the Search Engines do with it".   Part of Search is the Search Engines …how they handle and rank content - you can't really control that…….so why try? 

Like Mike Moran says…..If you don't want to do it (SEO), then don't. I bet you won't notice much difference.

I think your right, Mike.