nightcats's Journal: Ask Slashdot: Can Quality Writing Live Beside SEO?

As a writer, I have a crucial question which needs input from geeks, and I hear a few of them hang out here. It's about SEO, which usually stands for Search Engine Optimization; but I call it Strange Eerie Orwellian. I use the Yoast plugin on WordPress and find that it's always sniping at me about omissions and flaws. The gold keyword must be in the title, in the first paragraph, and a dozen other places amid the content. The Flesch score is always yapping at me to make shorter sentences, as if the children out there reading their cell phones can't follow dependent clauses. Bottom line is that all this can turn a 1,200 word essay into a barrel of tripe. Search Engine Obsession appears to be making a mockery of quality; content is not king, it isn't even the prince's lapdog. Therefore, geeks, my questions: does SEO really matter for anyone but the owners of content farms? What rational options exist that may put prosody ahead of these draconian search rules? Or is it time for us writers to buckle down and accept the new reality, that we are no longer slaves to publishers and editors but to algorithms?