The reason people aren't engaging in [SEO] is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.

Not really. The link-building tutorial page Louie links to at the Singularity Volunteers site contains several examples of link-building tasks that require little experience:

Comment on blogs and in forums. Although some blogs still utilize “nofollow” tags on outbound comment links, it is not a trend that I foresee continuing as long as comment spam protection keeps improving. Therefore, I recommend leaving high-quality insightful comments on other blogs, which will create a backlink and could entice blog owners to link back to your site in the future. Also, you have a far better chance of acquiring a back link if you’ve contributed something to someone else’s blog first.

[Submit] your website to various niche, local, and general directories...

The other pages linked at the bottom of that page provide lots of other examples.

Also, Louie is entirely right about this:

Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible... Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".

I've spent enough time cleaning rooms and moving boxes and furniture and so on at Singularity Institute (including an entire day just last week) that I could have written and published 1-3 more papers by now if I hadn't done any of that.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people get the idea that mundane work is "trivial."

If you want to do mundane tasks for me so I can write more papers on Friendly AI like this one, please contact me: luke [at] singularity.org.

Props to John Maxwell for being the latest person to actually do something mundane and high value for me, freeing up my time so I can work on an intelligence explosion book chapter tonight.