SEO, when it is practiced with the intent of “tricking” search engine 'bots to rank your site higher, is a fool’s game. Any technique that can be thought up will be uncovered as such and disallowed, leading to an arms race of Spy vs. Spy proportions.
SEO when it is really content strategy and good Design (capital D, whereby I mean design as intent and structure and content, not just presentation) is a perfectly wholesome and desirable effort.
My Rules of SEO (variously restated) often boil down to something like this:
Be Honest. Set out to present information for humans, and to present it as if you were talking only to the humans. If you take care to present your information so that a blind person can “read” it with a screen reader, you will have completely covered the 'bots.
Be Interesting. If you know a lot about a topic, write thoughtfully about it. Don’t be afraid to go long. If you have lots of related content, link it appropriately so that an overview expands into sub-topics either within that tall page or a collection of other pages.
Be Human. Write in the voice of the person you want to reach. Many over-optimized sites have a staccato, robotic voice to them (no surprise). Write your content as if you were speaking to someone you like.
Be Current. Frequently changed pages are not the goal, additional pages (relevantly linked) will expand your authority on a topic more than a page that’s randomly changed just so it appears to be current.
Be Patient. SEO changes are often marketed as a quick fix. This leads to unfair expectations, and frustration. Two months is not too long to wait to see if something is having the intended effect.
Walter
On Jun 6, 2012, at 9:49 AM, Ernie Simpson wrote:
Any thoughts on the appropriate application of SEO? Walter, I take it you
feel it is best handled as a function of best content and design practices?
I am liking this conversation 
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