Many companies which provide services for search engine optimisation make the process simple and easy-to-understand for the less web-savvy customer, but whether this is an admirable quality or not is open to debate.

David Mihm, a website designer and SEO consultant, compares an SEO company that simplifies the process to a snake oil salesman - that is, the product they are selling is fake.

He believes that by turning SEO web design into simple components like search engine submission and meta-tags, clients are being conned because such techniques aren't useful for higher rankings or increased traffic.

Whereas a successful SEO company will deal with productive techniques like like-building and site architecture, but these aren't "easily-defined deliverables".

However, snake oil SEO still sells because people like a simple solution, even when the topic is complicated - he cites John McCain's "Drill here, drill now" solution to the USA energy crisis as an example.

"In an age of soundbites and headlines, everyone is strapped for time and looks for something easy to latch onto," he writes.

"Snake oil SEOs have taken a page from the politicians' books.

"They're successful because they've realised this trend and have capitalised on it with a scalable, drastically over-simplified 'product' and combined it with aggressive 'marketing outreach.'"

But is Mr Mihm being overly critical and there are some cases where simple SEO can actually benefit a business?

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