Should we kill and die for SEO?

[*shin Retro Qix <3.]

Go to any webmasters forum, enter the SEO section and see how devotedly people are working on Search Engine Optimization. Making the site bot-friendly (XHTML, CSS, WAI-AAA), amount of indexed pages seems to have an unjustified extra weight and this whole meta tags and keywords density fuss sometimes crosses the line. Is it really that important? It is, if most your traffic comes from Google and other SE, but if it isn’t? You need thousands of pages that has been aggressively promoted for years in order to be ranked high enough.

The thing is, if your website deals with something unique, something that has little (if at all) results in Google, you will show up upon every search anyway, however, if your site deals with popular keywords (which are normally the high paying ones), such as “SEO� (110,000,000 results in Google) or “Digital Cameras� (97,300,000 results in Google) or better off - “Free Software� (1,090,000,000 results in Google. Only), where are you exactly in this list?
Just imagine making one more site about free software… Do you really believe you will make it to the top 10 results? Or even top 50? Ever?? The competition is absolutely inhuman, the money invested in back links and promotion are immeasurable and no matter how perfectly your website will be optimized for SEO - you won’t get more than a few hundreds of visitors from SE’s. It’s a fact that most “average� websites (I mean we are excluding MS, Apple, CNet, Download.com, and some others of that rank) do not benefit from more than 20% - 30% of traffic from SE. Most websites have even less. A lot less.
So, does SEO worth dedicating hours to?

[cpvr]

Well, we shouldn't exactly kill and die for SEO because it doesn't really matter, you can try hard and sometimes you don't have to.

[katebeswick]

I agree that there is so much out there it seems at times not even worth entering the competition. But everything is always worth the good ol' college try...I wouldn't kill and die though, no.