Chasing Google ranks is an abysmal practice, but a basic level of SEO goes a long way in making content discoverable and accessible. As for the rest of the practices of the SEO industry, I believe in the saying "if you provide good content, you don't need to SEO".
Would you mind elaborating a little on where you draw the line? In my mind "SEO" means adding the correct meta tags to the html, but I suspect that's because I have approximately zero wisdom on the subject.
SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) get mixed up a lot. SEO vs SEM is like aesthetics (color theory, composition, etc) vs a billboard ad. The latter cares about the former, but the former is innocent.
I honestly love https://mataroa.blog it ended my paralysis for searching a blog platform, and every page is bog standard HTML. It accepts Markdown, plus it has its own anonymous analytics, so it's nice.
On the other hand, everyone has different needs, and I wish Banner blog the best of luck!
A number of my blog posts appear on Google's first page. I have some SEO tags but I don't optimise for it, nor do I make content that is purely built to feed the algorithm, I just write content that is applicable to people, and has some of the basic tags in it.
Although I can see why you may do that, it also does discount things that are relevant
I feel like the new kinda-alternative on the rise is to support federation with either ActivityPub, BlueSky/ATProto or both.
That is, instead of going for search engines, go for open social. It’s obviously a new and relatively unpopular ecosystem, but makes much more sense than this SEO stuff IMO.
Wordpress have rolled out their AP support and it seems to be working well so far. I just “replied” to a blog post on mastodon today without even realising it was from a blog.