[Cthulhu_]

What Google has done over the years is thwart some of the scummy SEO practices by penalizing websites that do it; a big part of current-day SEO practices are to make your website conform to web and content standards. Basically, turn it into a decent site.

There's still the black market SEO where people hire spambots to send links, but that's been thwarted / voided by just adding a nofollow to links in user generated content like comments.

[mcnesium]

but then you wouldn't do "search engine optimization", but rather proper web engineering.

[Jorsiem]

SEO has become an ambigous, all encompassing term. "Proper web engineer" is now a subcategory of SEO.

Also "proper web engineering" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

[dredmorbius]

PWE -- peewee.

[bduerst]

The point is there's a Venn diagram where these two standards overlap.