When I write content, I do so in a way that comes natural. I don’t use certain words over others because they taste better to the spiders. I write as a human for other humans.

That’s all. He wasn’t saying SEO is crap. He was just saying “write naturally”, that’s all. Not sure how it got off onto a whole markup/theme/SEO topic. Write for people. That’s it.

SEO “tricks” are crap.

On the other hand, using sensible markup to describe content correctly is not crap, and actually works.

Quick example: Often I see people using a series of DIV elements with some class for some common set of things. Like a sidebar, for example. This is bad mojo and should be avoided. Instead, use an unordered list. If you don’t like that it gives you bullet points, you use CSS to turn them off.

Markup should be used as a means to describe the types of content it contains, CSS should be used to define the layout and look of that markup, and content-descriptive classes and id’s should be used to connect the two. And yes, this will help your SEO value, tremendously. If you think Google doesn’t pay attention to what is inside header and paragraph tags and such to assign relative importance values, then you’re nuts.

“Ask for details” is key, but it assumes you know what to ask about. It’s still buyer beware. Who do you believe, and who do you trust? People new to WordPress or websites or SEO in general frequently have NO IDEA what to ask for, and get screwed in the process.

I don’t dismiss everything around SEO as junk, I just think it’s better for everyone, including Google if humans come first before spiders. This site has a page rank of 5, an Alexa Ranking below 30,000 and has a devoted fan base all accomplished without any SEO trickery.

Kinda my point; Google isn’t the one who’s reading your blog, actual people are. I’d much prefer to have a dedicated readership than a high Google ranking where people will visit once and never come back. If you’re blogging for Google you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

If the theme you’re buying has “SEO” listed in a bullet point list of features with no elaboration, it’s probably nothing special. Ask for details!!!

StudioPress themes (as they stand right now, pre-Genesis) are pretty good at SEO. Not great, but pretty good. We’ve done a considerable amount of work bringing Genesis up to par with other themes that do SEO well.

“If the theme you’re buying has “SEO” listed in a bullet point list of features, then it’s probably BS.”

studiopress.com bullet point #2:
“Professionally Search Engine Optimized”

I don’t agree that because someone lists SEO in a bullet point for their theme’s selling points means it’s BS. Joost and StudioPress do a good job.

I certainly believe it can be counterproductive to write for SEO, but it makes sense to present what you write in a way that search engines will find it and readers will enjoy it when they do. Each site/business will have to decide what investment of time/resources is warranted for a potential increase in traffic from SEs, but at some point the marginal return from better content, outways the marginal return for theme tweaking.

Write your title and content for humans, sure, but be aware that they aren’t the only ones “reading” your content. Try to at lease slip a keyword or part of a keyphrase into your post/page titles (wrapped in H1 of course). Then use Thesis, Genesis, Hybrid, or AiOSEO/Headspace2 plugins to craft the doctitle. Users won’t ever see that anyway, but it’s what search engines look at before anything else on-site.

I’m not saying to stuff keywords in there … I hate that, and I don’t think it works very well … I’m just saying to use it to rewrite your title to target your keyword or keyphrase.

That way, you don’t have to look at this as an either/or scenario. You can write both for humans AND spiders and get the benefits from both.