There are those who say that say SEO is a con and those that defend it saying it helps many, many people.

I think the debate is summed up well with the following analogy. Just replace ‘oil change’ with ‘SEO’ and ‘your car’ with ‘your website’:

I pay to have the oil changed on my car. Of course, I could do it myself. It would be cheaper, I should know my own car and working on it would give me the best results since it’s my car. But I choose not to, and so do many other people – 7 billion dollars a year worth. Am I and all these people stupid? Don’t we not know we could do it ourselves? Is the oil change industry a huge con?

Of course not.

People choose to not change their own oil for many valid reasons:
They don’t have the technical (albeit simple) know-how and have no desire to learn it
It’s time consuming
Its dirty

Is it possible that the workers in an oil change shop take advantage of their customers by selling them things they don’t need? You bet they do. It happens every day. That doesn’t make it right, but unfortunately that’s what happens when there is an imbalance of information.