On one hand if you have a few hundred items in inventory you are probably not in the market for an enterprise solution but (unfortunately) I see a lot of websites with muti-million product inventories that are not being indexed.

Probably the thing I appreciate most about what you said is that content relevance which we hope is driven by a marketing strategy. You are also correct that search engines have come a long way related to indexing capabilities however I still see people struggling to get indexed for fear of voiding services for some very expensive ECM packages.

The ECM vendors are not really to blame either since their role is providing a sound framework and how can they predict how a customer wants to populate a title tag? Defaulted schemas are not as valuable as a version that is focused and compelling so the gap lies between some of the larger vendors and the clients understanding…. which was a discussion brought to me that inspired this post .

Based on the examples brought to me I think that there is still opportunities to help people get to the W3C compliance by virtue of a scalable and easily customizable system.

So yes, SEO IS marketing but sometimes we need to help some folks get indexed before its worth customizing the messages.

Thanks very much for the comment though, I think my scope was more narrow than the post introduced.

SEO today is nothing to do with browsers or good or bad HTML, it is purely about content, relevant content to users, links between relevant sites and communities and ofcourse, your social media presence.

For right or wrong, SEO is marketing, communications and public relations, it has next to nothing to do with IT or website standards anymore

This is something I have spoken about a number of times, my recent post of which is http://andrewonedegree.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/don%e2%80%99t-use-it-to-provide-seo-and-smo/