Lots of misinformed people here/people who have had a bad experience and now are taring a whole industry with the same brush
Everyone jumps around shouting "content is king" because it rhymes and they have had it drilled into them, rather than challenging the argument or testing it in ways that enable them to understand it. People like to repeat other peoples arguments as its safer to be on the site with the loudest voice but the reality is that backlinks are still king and they will be for a very long time.
This is proven by the fact adobe is still sat at #1 for the search term "click here" and that is not going to change, if you know the basics of SEO this paragraph will make sense to you, if not then dont spend too long reading up on it, its not really that interesting.
Dismissing SEO as a credible form of advertising is pretty crazy, I know a lot of people gave up on it when it became more difficult and most of these people threw their dummies out of the pram cursing google when their tricks stopped working but the way to sell something online is to get the eyes on your sales pages and then convince the eyes to buy.
Adwords was a 42 billion dollar industry in 2012 and it grows year on year, adwords is getting the page/product in front of people who search but SEO is getting the product in front of people who search without needing to pay per click and also getting the page/product in what has been proven to be a more trusted area of the search results page than the sponsored area. If it didnt work it wouldnt be a 42 billion dollar industry increasing year on year.
Just for info I historically chose terrible usernames because I like to take a stance against the strange trend I notice of grown men, sometimes upwards of 30 calling themselves things like "Tokyo Revolver" or "Black fallen angel of mega death" which is something that I really dont get to this day as usually the "Black fallen angel of mega death" drives to work each day in a suit and tie to do paperwork....
Anyhow, I wont labor this thread but if anyone does want some SEO consultation/detailed work doing drop me a pm and we can discuss, I handled some of the most valued accounts at what is probably the biggest online marketing agency in the UK for several years, you will know within a few minutes of swapping pms with me that I know what I am doing no matter how much online marketing experience you have I will be able to add something...