On a post from Techcrunch regarding some meta search engine Jeremy Zawodny says the following:

So now a spammer (err, I mean “SEO”) can get money from a search engine by being in the top 10 even if they’re never clicked on.

Comment no. 15

Ok, Jeremy has a very unusual sense of humor and saying things in the face and I LIKE that but putting an equal sign between SEO and spam is quite …not a thing to do. I know that there are suckers outhere spamming blogs and screwing up results (and yes I am no stranger from the black arts) but not always SEO=spam. Proper page formatting, proper site structures, legit sites submissions and tweaking, keyword research, web analytics and so on  do not equal spam.

And I think that this dangerous association was started/promoted by Matt Cutts with his posts (miss)labeled “SEO Mistakes“. If a Google engineer thinks that SEO is nothing more than spam and the “mistake” is being caught then this SUCKS big time.

Additional resources:

• Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO
• Worthless Shady Criminals: In Defense of SEO, Part 1