http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey seems relevant.

Yes, SEO has clearly a negative notion for me. To deceive the search engine and make it less useful for me is practically the job description of SEO, in my opinion.

For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.

I can see what you are saying but I see SEO a bit differently than being simply good web programming. It's about content organization as well as information flow. Some of the time that comes naturally to a webmaster, but there are so many content rich sites with poor web programming and poor organization. SEO is a niche side of web programming that fixes that specific problem. The skills of an SEO sometimes don't even cross the mind of a "good" web programmer because of the unknown unknowns factor. They just haven't thought about even attempting to rank a website on Google. They aren't investigating the competition to see where they fit, and how to be better.

If you care about the underlying algorithms, I'd think it's pretty clear which kind of SEO we're talking about.

I think it would be reasonable to understand the underlying algorithms in order to optimise what white hat SEO to spend effort on. But I accept that this is probably a rare breed.

This is true. But there really are hundreds of thousands (probably millions and millions) of sites that are structured horribly where you can simply rely on knowing how the heck to structure a page correctly.

For instance...

I recently moved a corporate site for a major national law firm from Joomla to WordPress. They had 200+ pages with multiple H1 tags, nearly 300 pages missing descriptions, dozens and dozens of soft 404s, hundreds of pages with bad titles or URLs that are too long, dozens of pages with duplicate content because of bad sitemaps, and every single page was over 100 links because of the dummy that made the original nav toolbar put every subpage in there.

White hats can work for the next decade simply trying to save companies from themselves, their stupid CMS systems, and former well meaning SEO efforts that are now banned or deprecated.

Short term effect to fixing these issues? A nearly 20% increase in traffic since the switchover and slightly raised ranking for related firm content on OTHER sites.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

Is the first group SEOs, or information architects? Good information navigation design will consider searchability and, more importantly, human accessibility (a large part of which will be searchability, but search serves the primary need of people to find information efficiently).

Good point, white hat SEO is simply applied IA.

Thanks for the resumé tip :)

Making your site easy to crawl and find can be spammy when taken too extremes, yes, but it's also about quality basics. Good titles, site structure, URL structure, relevant internal linking, etc.

As an analogy, making your restaurant easy to find (relevant name, standard names for things, signs out front, etc.) is important unless you're so well-branded that can get by on having a secret, unmarked door.