One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve heard about SEO is that it’s about the algorithm.
This belief ignores that the algorithm is meant to help us, people (i.e. humans).
What does the algorithm really do? It organizes information, and it does it in a way that makes sense to people.
The reality is that we build technology in an attempt to replicate the way we think, talk, behave, etc. This is the same thought process behind AI.
As a past educator teaching reading and writing, technology in the field of composition & rhetoric for pedagogical purposes was used to identify how students store, process, retrieved, and made sense of information.
The name of the game is “meaning making”.
It is the same with SEO.
We pay attention to keywords not because of the algorithm but because that’s what people are searching. Granted we are doing this for business rather than teaching, but at the core is the same impetus to understand people’s relationship to language and information.
Yes, there are technical aspects to SEO just like there are technicalities to anything else (e.g. writing, painting, music, etc.).
BUT no, SEO is not about the algorithm. It is about understanding how people process, retrieve, and make sense of information online.
The algorithm (or algorithms really) is simply a filter through which we understand how people do this.
NOTE: I’m aware there are biases in algorithms, which do need to be addressed and this is part of a larger conversation. This does not change the fact that algorithms are essentially filters (like our ideologies are filters) processing how information is accessed and retrieved.