The paradigm of SEO is the consequence of its misuse. But that’s what Caffeine is for – to clean up the mess. Of course there’s good SEO, but anyone in the field has seen entire industries centered on paid and reciprocal link building. Not that either practice is inherently bad, they’re just no longer sustainable.
Audit your user interface and code, optimize images with related non-spammy meta-tags (GIFs or PNGs for smaller files and JPEGs for larger more detailed images), purge unnecessary duplicate content and take steps to increase page load speeds – there’s a direct correlation in site speed and indexing.