Is SEO a bag of tricks for spammers or are there legitimate purposes for search engine optimization?

Answer 1

Legitimate Purposes SEO has extremely legitimate uses. Search engines cannot find websites without help. They cannot categorize a site without reading and analyzing content. In order for websites to be properly identified and their content indexed a site must be well put together. A site with good titles, good meta descriptions, broad content, properly dense in keywords and all the other small things, will receive a much better ranking than competing sites in a keyword search. SEO is much maligned, often justifiably, because spammers and con artists use it to trick the search engines into sending you to their Web pages instead of the pages you really want. People are always trying to figure out how the search engines work so that they can get more traffic. It's inevitable. Legitimate webmasters need to know at least the basics of SEO. Otherwise they might accidentally do something that gets them wrongfully labeled and banned from search engines.