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Dave Pasternack is at it again. I held back in joining in the SEO isn't rocket science debate because I didn't want to give Dave or Did-it any more attention then they deserve, but DMNews followed up with him and he not only stuck to his guns, but lashed out once again.

Dave implies that paid search is the only way to go, but it is terribly compicated, so you should just hire his company. He feels SEO, on the other hand is as easy as baking a cake:

If I really wanted to bake one, I'd buy a cookbook (the Google guidelines) and bake away. Can you imagine bake shops trying to convince everybody that baking a cake is so complicated that it shouldn't be left to mere mortals? Ridiculous. I wonder what percentage of Danny's show attendees are there to find the "magic SEO elixir".

Well, Mr. Pasturesnack, I've got to agree with you. SEO is like baking a cake. Let me describe the cake I am currently working on.

My SEO Cake:

* My cake serving size is large. It needs to feed 10 million people a month. And if I continue to bake it properly, it should feed about 15 million people a month by year end.
* My cake can't be made from a mix out of a box - it is much too complicated. The cookbook you mention is for beginners and couldn't possibly replace my 10 years of baking experience.
* My cake is complicated. It has hundreds of thousand of ingredients, millions of variations and is constantly worked on by 70 blind cooks. Being the only SEO cook, I have to watch the other 70 to make sure they each mix ingredients correctly.
* Basking Robbins has 31 flavors. My cake has millions and people call them by different names. It is important that I understand and keep up with all possible flavors and names for those flavors to properly cater to their needs.
* My cake is valuable. One slight error in baking my SEO cake would result in all 70 cooks immediately losing their jobs. The cost of baking this cake is $0 - time is the only cost. To replace my SEO cake with a PPC cake would cost around $84 million a year.
* Though my cake is white, I need to know how the gray and black cakes are made. Otherwise my white cake might be mistaken for a black cake and could get burned in the oven.

Ovens? We can't forget to mention the search engines ovens.

* The ovens are complicated. The main oven is known to have over 200 dials. Each dial's importance changes frequently and dials are swapped out over time. Two other problems: the dials are unlabled. And they are invisible.
* The ovens don't work properly. Some have been broken for years. Plus, they all come with bad cook deterrents, but good cooks get torched in the process. To make matters worse, there's no number to call if one of the ovens burns your cake.
* The ovens change over time. Just when you get used to an oven, they swap it out for a new model. It's not necessary to keep up with every mechanical modification in the oven, but it is important to know what types of cakes the ovens will favor in the future.

I've baked plenty of PPC cakes in my time. There's no way they are nearly as complex, nor as fruitful as an SEO cake.