Sifish pointed me to an article at the Wall Street Journal's Startup Journal by Sarah Needleman - Three Myths on Boosting Search-Engine Rankings. It a fairly primitive stab at explaining how the industry operates, and once again it pushes the pervasive view that most search engine optimization companies are opportunistic vultures who prey on the ignorance of small and mid-size companies.

There were some nice mentions and good advice given by Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch, Jamie Low of SearchEngineMarketing.com (whom I don't know personally) and Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath (who spoke at the last two SES conferences here in North America).

The good advice includes a mention that search engines don't need to be submitted to and that keyword repetition (stuffing) can hurt, rather than help your site's rankings.