[ricardo81]

'SEO' has a bad rep but there are legitimate concerns about how a site is made and how discoverable that information is.

I think of it as 'helping search engines understand your content', like preferably having your content in raw HTML rather than JS driven (less a problem nowadays with Google/Bing), a good site architecture, structured markup and avoidance of keyword cannibalisation.

Darker side is simply 'manipulating search engines'. Building pages for the sake of ranking, acquiring low quality backlinks, low quality content. Obvious paid for links on irrelevant pages. Daft things like keyword stuffing.

Google hires 10's of thousands of manual raters (at least last time I read about it) - generally if a site looks low effort and/or quality it's not going to succeed.

There'll definitely be actors in this world who know how to game Google at will, but obv plenty people who also think they can do a good job who actually can't, regardless of the ethics of how they do it.