SEO a necessary evil?

Jason Calacanis: SEO is Crap.
Aaron: Scr*w you Man. Why did you create those empty pages with Keyword Elite Phrases as in the title and the URL?
Marshall Simmonds: You just need to write content to rank well. Just write using a template.

SEO have come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing, but has it come that far?
Truely speaking, SEO is no rocket science. White HAT SEO that is.

Black HAT can take rocket science level innovation and then throw away all of it and move on to a new innovation by the time google engineers come to learn of it.

But white hat?
Social engineering?
Digg Baiting?
Are these really SEO?

Why should I go out and pay a digg bait specialist, when I can just buy enough in content links to point to my internal pages that I want to rank.

But problem is, there are thousands of people out there who don't know hoot about the importance of inbound links, of H1 tags, duplicate contents and SILOs and such like.

Basic things that can send some traffic to a website.
Now for highly competitive niches, you need to have something of real value in order to get a link from an authority site. And an authority site won't link to you unless you have a REALLY great site, and if you have a really great site, you don't need to buy links anyway.

I mean SEO is all about links.
And links to internal pages.
From the content of another webpage.
That is releval to your site and very relevant to that page.