After reading it my first thought was that I hoped no one from the SEO shire had been mouthing off and giving you a hard time.

I agree with your four point strategy too. Although I may be interpreting your fourth point according to my needs! Just the other day someone approached us, explained they where building a very large database and needed it optimised. Oh dear. I had to explain to them that this wasn’t the ‘search engine optimisation’ we offered.

By the way; a senior spam/we quality engineer at Google often says that clean code doesn’t matter that much (there’s a video of this speach out there somewhere – I’ll try and dig it up for you if you want). Why not? So many sites are less than perfectly coded that Google felt that their search results would be impaired if these sites picked up any negative score as a result.

Of course, if a site is so badly coded that neither crawler nor indexer can make head or tail of it then, yeah, that causes problems!