In an fiery post over at SEOroundtable, John Scott stated his opinions regarding what he calls the two styles of search engine optimization: Content SEO and Link Mongers.

Do you think on-page seo is outdated? Discuss here.

Is Organic SEO Dead?

Organic SEO is Dead? He’s of the opinion that Content SEO is dead, and that anyone interested in raising their search engine rankings should focus only on link generation.

He italicized this section of his post, making plain his position:

“You cannot keyword density your client into a #1 spot for highly competitive keywords. You cannot page title your client into a #1 spot for highly competitive keywords. The only way you’re going to get there is by way of PageRank and anchor text of inbound links.”

Optimize, Then Build Links. Now, I’m no SEO expert, but I’m having trouble believing that it’s worthwhile to stop optimizing your web pages for the bots. I think John’s point is a good one – that link building is vital in your quest for top ranking on competitive keywords, but to cut out on-page optimization seems a bit drastic.

Advice For Link Building. Here’s a useful bit of advice from a later post of his: “I think the best strategy is to focus on topical links as much as possible. If you are targeting “web hosting”, then do a search for “web hosting” and do whatever is needed to get links from as many sites as possible in that SERP set.”

Is Organic Really Dead? Common sense says it’s not, and so does Dan Thies. “If you don’t have those words on the page then you’re not showing up.”

However, he added that, “what’s happening off the page is more important than it’s ever been. That’s going to be a trend that continues, but ultimately content brings in visitors.”

Be sure to get in on this important discussion.

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.