Right alpine, as the only thing that can be optimized by the tweaking of the code on one website is the positioning of that site relative to others on a search engine. The term for those who work for search engines to try and get the best results are the algo coders. The 2 sides aren't totally at odds. Those who code search engine algos do so on the assumption that webmasters will create sites in a way that search engines can determine what they are about, and thus use that as a basis for ranking. Search engines largely base their algos on what used to be standard "basics" that could be found in webmastering texts. This goes back to the day where websites were pretty much text based. I see tons of sites today with lots of visually exciting flash content, graphics etc. designed by website design pros for clients who think that what is important is to have a site that is visually apealling to the surfer. Unfortunately, search engine spiders could not care less about how pretty the site looks. The SEOs are called in when the company doesn't realize why the fancy looking site they paid good money for is unfindable in the search engines. SEOs are the folks who teach clients and site designers that the WWW ain't TV.
The irony is that between the lousy flash trash site designers on one side, and unethical SEOs on the other, they are actually increasing the importance of the ODP. In the early days of the WWW directories tended to be more important because the search engine algos back then often gave poor results for searches. Directories by their nature categorize by content. Today, because these sites designed on visual appeal are hard for search engines to figure out, it takes a human editor of a directory to be able to categorize them. And, while search engines can be fooled by lots of doorway pages and articficially crosslinked sites, human editors can spot these.
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