Yes, so long as the reason for doing them is to improve readability/usability/accessibility for people and the semantic integrity of the document. Putting a bunch of keywords into an alt attribute might fool the search engines into thinking that image is a tad more relevant, but it can easily harm the content and inconvenience human readers. And that’s really my only beef with the SEO industry: they all too often advocate targeting the search engines and not the searchers. (Sweeping generalization, grain of salt required.)

Indeed, I’ve not done a single thing on my own website that is geared exclusively to “SEO”. I try to write readable, useful content on a semi-regular basis. I adhere to web standards and give my content a simple, meaningful structure. I’ve made an effort to keep my content accessible to disabled readers and operable in a wide range of user-agents.

And I do pretty well in rankings, not because I targeted Google, but simply because I’ve tried to do right by the web as a whole. Of course, I’m not selling anything and I don’t run any ads, so I’ve never actively tried to drive traffic here. Maybe I could inject more keywords into my content, even if it means the content becomes unreadable. Maybe I could stuff keywords into every available orifice, even if it makes content inaccessible and confusing. I’m sure I could do things that would haul in more eyeballs in the short term, but I prefer to appeal to the brains behind them.

“it’s to tell the search engines that each of your pages in unique”

Yes, but pages should be unique by actually, well, being unique. Engines filter out pages with duplicate content for a reason, why try to disrupt that? I never said a meta description was bad, in fact it’s a very good thing to have. I just don’t wish to see it abused the same way meta keywords were.

Google returns 178 unique pages on my site and 75 duplicates. I have no meta description. Those duplicate pages are in fact duplicate pages: alternate URIs pointing to the exact same content due to cross-categorized posts. So maybe I just don’t understand what you mean by “unique”, and I’m not grasping how two pages with different content would be mistaken for duplicates, nor how two duplicate pages with different descriptions will be of any benefit to anyone.

“The bottom line is that there’s still a need for SEO. You just can’t simply publish and all is good.”

Unfortunately true, because so many people are writing bad content wrapped in worse markup specifically engineered to appeal to searchbots instead of people, so some content that is “simply published” (and published simply) will be buried in search results. It can’t be this way forever. I’m probably just being idealistic, envisioning a web where everything is clean and honest and content is useful and structured and search engines can do their job unfettered. But I also envision a world without spam if enough people stop responding to it that it becomes financially unsound, so call me a fool.

I didn’t read through your complete post because a lot of what you’re saying is wrong. One thing that jumped out at me though was your thoughts on the meta description tag. I think you fail to understand why it’s important and why. The meta descripition tags is not for the purpose of stuffing in keywords so that Google sees it as more relevant, it’s to tell the search engines that each of your pages in unique. When you do a site search for your blog how many pages does it Google say are indexed and how many pages do they actually show before the results are duplicated.

The bottom line is that there’s still a need for SEO. You just can’t simply publish and all is good.

Best,

Cameron