In the past, I wrote an opinionated blog rant about how SEO is overrated, and how if you want to rise in search engine rankings, your only focus should be building a good product. I was looking for opinions or echoes on the net, and I found out that my radical ideas about Search Engine Optimization have already occured to others.
Having spent the better part of a year now working in the aggregation end of a major search engine, I ... I really have to take that back. I mean, yes, being relevant is a huge boon to your search ranking, but being crawlable is necessary before you even get into the index at all! If you have a convoluted POST-based navigation or you require Flash, Acrobat or even JavaScript to navigate your site, search engines will have an uphill struggle to index your content. Technology to do so is improving, but the bread-and-butter of search indexing is still GET-based.
Interestingly, making the right decisions to get crawled well, will also help you make good accessibility decisions, too. Have you ever looked at NoScript? It's a firefox plugin that disables all JavaScript by default. It's troublesome to manually enable scripting for new sites, but in exchange you get to have very high confidence that you won't get remotely pwned by a rogue website. And if you're optimizing a site for accessibility/SEO, it also helps you test and see how your site performs to the average search indexing bot (or browser for the blind, or low-end mobile browser, etc.) It doesn't have to look pretty with NoScript, but if it's not browsable without Javascript enabled, it's not as indexable as it could be.
There are obviously inappropriate SEO moves, like packing keywords or spamming links, that not only don't work in the long run, they're counterproductive, because resources that go into temporary, artificial ranking boosts are resources that could be directed into relevance. Or heck, into paid search advertising. It's kind of expensive, but if you need to get your name out, paid search works.
