Are hashtags the new SEO?

A friend asked me an interesting question the other day: Are hashtags the new SEO? I remember spending a good chunk of my time optimizing my websites for search engines. I handpicked keywords that I wanted to “score” good on in the search engines, and hand crafted a description that I wanted to apply to my online projects for everyone to see.

But, with Google (and other search engines) becoming smarter in their algorithms over time, a large portion of the contributing factors for your rankings no longer is based as much on what you, as a publisher, decide to put on your website. How visitors interact with a site has become a much larger influence now. Because whether or not a site “deserves” to rank high in the search rankings has more to do with how much value a visitor actually gets from a site, versus what the publisher of the site thinks it does.

So is SEO no longer important? I don’t think so. When I was in college I’ve built a small “do-it-yourself” search engine submission servic…