1. Once upon a time someone invented printing machines
2. People started printing books, newspapers (exchange knowledge)
3. Then people started printing little ads within those things
4. Most surely (wasn't there) someone noticed that position and content of those ads makes impact (is correlated) to the success
5. People started selling marketing services to improve companies use of those marketing channels
6. More and more agencies and professionals were rising
7. Suddenly the ad space became expensive
8. People invented PR
9. Suddenly PR became expensive
10. Well, then internet came

I belive you see my point as being a professional. This is a time-money game. And on long term, by the rules of economics, valuable space (where many people put their eyes and money on) becomes expensive. You need big money to be where big masses of people are.

Of course, we're not quite there yet. But in 5 years time, no matter how you turn it, money will bring customers to the company. If the company pays 10.000$ to local media or SEO professional, what's the difference? It's10.000$.

Anyway, was Facebook about good SEO to become such a success?

But I do agree on your points within year 2010 for example. It's the hit of the moment and you can take advantage right this moment for many industries/regions/markets.

But looking a bit into the future, one thing can be clear. Who pays more, gets higher in search pages. It can't be avoided.

It is obvious that you need good people to do this job. The better the person, the higher the results. The better the person, the more you need to pay that person.

Not little economics does the trick in the question who can pay the best people to do the best job.

Surely there's a lot of if-then-but-hmh here, but in the long term, you can't beat the big ones only by SEO. First you need an amazing product. Then SEO will find you (as Chuck Norris does:-)).

If you have a great product, people talk about it. Over twitter, FB, blogs,… you don't even need any special website, people will make it for you.

I do optimization for our clients othwerwise. ))

Hope I didn't complicate too much. Just stressing out that SEO is currently overblown and people don't manage their core products well anymore.

My blog covers a wide range of topics and the future of SEO is very much at the core of many articles you'll find on this site.

'The true marketing is in product'. I'd have to disagree with this comment – in particular when this is related to online marketing. The 'product' is only part of the traditional and online variation of the marketing mix. If you don't have the necessary marketing channels tuned and ready to promote your product, your product will simply pass by your intended audience.

The true marketing is in product.