The biggest thing about SEO that i've found is that there is no set way to do it. When I startted my site 2-3 months ago I was not ranked for my keywords. 1month later i was on page 12, 2 months page 5 now on top of page 2. SEO is basically like coding an application. There are always work arounds and whatever works and ticks all boxes as acceptable is good SEO. Google bot is only a long string of code at the end of the day and code can alway, ALWAYS be bypassed. Trial and error thats what SEO is. And good development is taking the norm and modifying it.
EDIT: like I said, SEO is trial and error, if you believe everything what you read on the net you'll get nowhere. Imagine evey developer on the planet stopping typing for 1 day and go right, we need to do our SEO like this, how this says.. EVERYONE would have "good" SEO so how would Google decide what goes where and how? rely on backlinks? What if everyone had the same amount of backlinks? All theoretically speaking but still, someone would have to break the mold eventually and try something else that is not written in stone and would eventually get somewhere.
If I was you I wouldn't even believe me! I would try it, test it, and see what happens. If that didn't work whats next?
"OOOooooo whatever you do don't wrap keywords in a tag and put display:none;"......
why? why is everyone reading that this is bad... How many folk have got content sliders on there page? google bot crawls javaless therefor has no way of changing some to display block or display the text behind overflow:hidden...
If it read display none in in the css, content that elements keyword density and worked out it was over 10% but the whole page density was under 10% how would it choose or decide to mark you down... who is in the wrong? Google for coming up with such madness or you for a bit of text that maybe currently out of view...
I've written PHP applications to detect Google bot, display different content to it.... "oooo dont do that if you get caught..." How is it possible as long as you have the same title and description tag that you are going to get caught?? No possible way unless there is a man in the bottom of the Google basement seeing if sites display the way there precious Google Bot cached data says it does..
EDIT: Another thing, people believed for 15/16years that google relied on a simple keywords meta tag to help Google bot on its merry way to distinguish what your keywords where (i believed it). But when you think about it, why on earth, with all the power Google claims and we believe it has would it need it when it can find out it's self in a 10th of a second what they are...
Anyway, always a work around!
EDIT: should really do some work...