You are right and you are wrong... With most things, you are right, but at the same time, there are lots of things you can do which completely shoots you in the search engines, despite having an otherwise good site. Flash-only navigation, no sitemap or using dropdowns for navigation, for example, are massive no-nos.
Other relatively good sites use images for text, because the designer decided that they want a font not everybody has installed. etc.
In addition, there are many things you can do to 'help search engines along' - instead of using CSS only to format text, for example, using H1-H6 tags for subheadings or important words helps the search engine decide what a particular page is actually about.
Your page can be well optimised for search engines without using SEO - but not the other way around.
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You are right and you are wrong... With most things, you are right, but at the same time, there are lots of things you can do which completely shoots you in the search engines, despite having an otherwise good site. Flash-only navigation, no sitemap or using dropdowns for navigation, for example, are massive no-nos.
Other relatively good sites use images for text, because the designer decided that they want a font not everybody has installed. etc.
In addition, there are many things you can do to 'help search engines along' - instead of using CSS only to format text, for example, using H1-H6 tags for subheadings or important words helps the search engine decide what a particular page is actually about.
Your page can be well optimised for search engines without using SEO - but not the other way around.