Content without traffic and traffic without purpose are both clearly nuts.

It's also true that there are too many 'snake oil salesmen' and poor developers.

I enjoyed your well-crafted presentation of the recent debate. For someone looking on from the periphery, it gave me an insightful, unbiased view of both sides. (Have you ever considered a career in arbitration?) I also enjoyed your listing of a number of background resources in both disciplines which helps to frame the debate within a wider context.

I agree that Derek's attempt to equate any good SEO technique with simply being good web development was off the mark. Danny and you correctly point out that this is naive and there is a whole range of legitimate SEO activities which would be very difficult to reasonably put under the web development umbrella. Enough said. That part of the debate should be over.

I didn't as strongly agree with your dismissal of some of the points you attribute to Danny's position. Specifically, you leaned on the distinction between whether SEO is “instrumental” versus “important” to an organization's online success. Sorry, that distinction seems just a little too subtle to justify the need to find some sort of common ground. Additionally, you claim for “SEO professionals to promote SEO as one of the primary tactics for online success is equally misleading.” Again, I don't agree that the claim that SEO is simply one, of potentially many primary tactics (some of which might involve content strategy) really is strong justification for the immediate need to find a common ground.

Perhaps surprisingly, although I question the details of how you arrived at your conclusion, I do ultimately wholeheartedly agree that “creating and maintaining awesome content that’s optimized for the right people to find it at the right time in the right places” is very–and, yes, I'm comfortable saying this–instrumental to an organization's online success. I also support your dream that the fruits of a well-executed content strategy can lead to this. I will, though, give the usual warning: Be careful what you wish for, girl, it may come true!

And when it does, content strategists can be the ones who will bring the sophistication to our methodologies which we so direly need. For instance, I've lately been on an–arguably Quixotic–quest to develop a framework, method, or just plain ol' set of steps to merging the input of usability testing around nomenclatures, card sorts and an SEO's search volume analysis in order to create a single taxonomy. Throw in marketing, design, and legal concerns and this could get quite messy. Though each camp often has its own approach and concerns, wouldn't it be great to have a systematic, scalable, and repeatable method of determining the best taxonomy given all these inputs? Who better than a content strategist to develop one?

You mention enterprise environment, which leads me back to legacy content and systems. We can't go backwards, bad legacy practices. i.e. lack of or inferior editorial reference, lack of processes and/or taxonomy exacerbates the current state. There are some things we can do to make it easier, but if the foundation isn't there we need to go back and fix that and build from there. The debate should not be about web development vs. SEO, or UX vs. content strategy or marketing vs.
sales, it should be about identifying and remediating content gaps.

How do you do that? One keyword string at a time.

But the big problem with Internet Marketing today lies on the customer side. There are several issues:
1. The customer doesn't get it — It is very difficult to outsource good content creation. If a business has hired you to write their tweets or post on their blog — do you really understand their industry? Do you really know enough to create something valuable? This leaves us with requesting content from the customer on a consistent basis. They have to be educated as to why they should create an article rather than have another full page 4 color print ad made up and published — it is easier for the customer to wrap their head around the value of the print ad.

2. The customer has limited time or money- Creating good content takes time or money. You have to do it yourself or you have to pay someone to do it.

If the content isn't coming in from the client and they don't have the money to pay you to do it — you are left with very few options.

You can turn down the deal or you can use SEO to get eyeballs to subpar content.