Ok, what about new companies entering a competitive niche? You can have a perfectly optimised website but still not get any traction in the search engines. These days a good cms will do your on page optimisation for you, but links are what you need to make your site visible. Yes you could build links yourself, but it probably isn't the most efficient use of your time as your success rate will usually be lower than that of an experienced seo.
And yes I'm a long time lurker who registered just to post this
Maybe I've misunderstood something about "SEO" as a position (thinking it was all about page optimization/design), but are you saying that its about building incoming links to a site as well?
Do companies hire you just to help build the number of links to their sites from other sites? How do you do this? Isn't that just plain old "marketing" at that point?
Yes plenty of companies request linkbuilding only, I'm not going to go into all the details of how we do it, but often its a case of contacting webmasters and asking them to link. Although there are certain techniques we use to increase our success rate which is where marketing aspects come in. In fact most good seo companies are really just online marketers, with seo being an umbrella term for a wide variety of techniques
Then in this case I think the discussion has become one where we use the same term to refer to different things: I've always thought of SEO as "use meta tags, use headlines, use short URLs, etc" - pure optimization of existing contact to help engines better parse your contact.
I'd label what you are referring to as more of online marketing to build a site/brand's presence and reputation, which is something that then influences a search engine ranking.
