True, you haven't been conned, you've just made two shitty hiring decisions in a row -- paying sone designer or developer who didn't build you a good site, and then paying a snake oil salesman to try and make your troubles disappear.
There's lots of legitimate ways to do SEO. Making the site more crawlable, setting up proper title tags, designing a good robots.txt, etc. Not all SEO is blackhat.
The author calls this "making good websites," and believes that if you run a website at all, you should be forced to learn about all of this stuff, even if your passion is just for writing. Further, he goes on to say its "obvious." By no means do I agree with him, just letting you know how he'd respond (taken from his response to similar comments on the article.)
