It sounds like you are up against the conventional wisdom of a web designer/web developer not a professional SEO. Just to clarify, I define a professional SEO as someone who can make a living on their own doing SEO and not work for a web development company. Any SEO that is worth their weight does not need to work for anyone else.

I agree with you that many web developers have a skewed view of what should really happen on a website. Either they are too focused on design or too focused on development. The missing piece with all of them is marketing.

Social Media Fight with SEO
As an internet marketer I believe that SEO and Social Media should be part of a holistic plan, not one vs. the other. Both complement each other very nicely and can be used to drive large amounts of visitors and customer to a website or blog.

Connection:
Absolutely, the more people you can connect with the better. I always say that FB and Twitter are like the sprinkles on an already delicious sundae (Your blog).

Heavy content
It’s not so much about having a lot of content on your site but having changing content. Blogging is one of my favorite ways to attract search engines to a site as it is offers fresh content. On the flip side of that, websites that want to compete for very competitive terms have to utilize more techniques than just having fresh content. That is where more advanced SEO techniques come into play.

Pretty is the New Ugly
Love this and totally agree. Companies get so worried about the look of their site. It’s more about functionality and good content than look these days. It kills me the amount of people that build their entire site in flash these days.

“Can there be simple social-media-friendly pages with great SEO?”
Absolutely, this happens every day with blogs and even static content.

Good read, keep it up. Talk to you soon.

SEO vs. Clean Sites
Yes, a trend in SEO is to crush a page with content. However, there are definite ways to load a ton of content into a page without making it heavy. The use of tabs, layers, and javascript is the key. Keep the content on the page, but just organize it better. This is where a good designer comes into play that knows 2.0 technologies, CSS and Javascript, CRO to effectively make a usable site and one that converts.

Connecting
Totally agree. You have to get your message across and connect.

Pretty is the New Ugly
Yes, speed is crucial, but there is still a need for good design. A good design will keep the user on longer, make it easier to comment, and get more calls to action. There is no reason a good CMS can’t force a writer to publish well. If the system is easy to use, strips out MS Word ugly code, then they don’t have to worry about publishing goofs. Plus a well designed site will plan for user error, long articles, wide photos, and other oddities that break design. Having a training plan in place + a review of the site every once in awhile never hurt too from a design standpoint.

SEO, on the other hand, is about playing the odds, using search terms that are likely to get someone, anyone, to look at your site. But if what people find at your site is not genuine, from the heart, and a valuable product or service, you won’t get the business anyway.

Great read as usual Adrian, I am an SEO that does not dispute the power of social media. As a matter of fact, I believe the only reason my site is at the top of SERP’s in Bing is due to twitter widget and the in/outbound links from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. To answer your question: Can we send people away from our site to social media sites AND increase the close rate of our web visitors? I believe the answer is yes, because those are two different strategies: people looking for an attorney are not likely to care about your social media outbound links, and people looking for industry leaders to follow are most likely not interested in your legal spiel…until they need it-