Is SEO a waste?

According to today's SiteProNews newsletter, American Express kind of denounced using SEO specialists to get higher ranking on Google, Yahoo, etc. Published in an AMEX recent small business guide:


"Search engines, like Yahoo! and Google, are usually the first
place people will look for you. Make it easier for them to find
you. Yahoo! and Google offer tools to let them know the site map
structure of your Web site."

"Also, using clean U.R.L.'s like yourdomain.com/store/widgets
instead of yourdomain.com/store.php?id=42&categoryID= widgets will
increase your chances of getting indexed in a search engine."

"Finally, don't waste money on so-called Search Engine
Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick
to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques,
and once your site has been put on Google's blacklist, it will
take forever to get off."

I tend to agree with them. There are sneaky ways to fool search engines to get you higher ranked in a shorter amount of time, but the tried and true ways seem to work best in the end. There is some justice in this crazy world we call cyberspace!