SEO by the Book

A recent Clickz article written by Mike Grehan is titled Does Textbook SEO Really Work Anymore? This article claims that the old-school /classic SEO is obsolete and is being replaced by different metrics used by the different search engines.

I keep banging the same old drum about the basic process of getting Web pages crawled and indexed by major search engines, compared to the more complex task of getting a decent rank. But really, if meta tags, H1 tags, alt text attributes, and other components of textbook SEO are so miniscule in the greater scheme of ranking, why do we bother?

This article had started a long thread (worth a read) at Cre8asiteForums, where most people tend to disagree with the article but rather think that it all depends on the industry / niche involved, and that no technique should be discounted.
I would have to join the thoghts expressed at the forum thread. Because a. if your title tags are missing or are purly constructed, chances are that less visitors will click through to your site from the different search engines. b. XE.com is a site that’s been online since 1994 and over time had developed over 2.2 million backlinks! so it is true, with this amount of backlinks any site would rank on top for almost any term with hardly no on-page optimization, but a site with much less links can rank better with appropriate on-page work.