"Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime"
That is something that always gets me. How can easy (implied) be a meaningful term for anything that is competitive. This is not like run a mile in x minutes (if x is big enough, anyone can do it), This is like run a mile faster then everyone else. By definition, not everyone can do it.
From the article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"
True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."
I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.