What a bullshit term. Read it back to yourself:
> Search Engine Optimization
They're already liars. They aren't optimizing anybody's search engine. They're optimizing HTML so that it can be easily parsed and crawled, but that doesn't sound as sexy.
It's marketing hocus pocus, tantamount to chart reading for day traders in the stock market. Just like chart readers, gazing into the Rorschach blots of spikes and trends in the stock market, they don't truly understand, and can't honestly answer to, how their composite numbers tie back to reality.
They honestly have no control over the search engines they claim to optimize for, and have only an outsider's probed understanding of the internal workings of the search engines they target. The exception to this is when former employees of search engines are hired as consultants at these places that claim to offer these services, but honestly aside from that sort of intra-industry incest, what else do they have to offer?
SEO as a term is a throwback to the late 90's when a lot of people didn't really understand what search engines do, and got sold on a trend.
Yes, yes, robots.txt. Yes, unobtrusive JavaScript. Yes, structure your DOM in a well-organized, logical manner. Yes, simplify unauthenticated link URLs, and try to correlate references semantically. Yes, use the alt, title and name attributes, to further orient semantics. I get it, okay. Y'know, these same ideas overlap well-enough with accessibility standards. Anything beyond this kind of coding practice is really either link spam, or simple tasks like requesting that a search engine crawl your domain. And that's a marketing campaign. Nothing is being optimized.
Can I stop putting this archaic buzzword on my resume? I don't optimize search engines, and unless you're posting an ad for a position at one, neither do you.
THEYYYYY!
/rant