Slowly but surely the search engines are changing, and because of this and a number of other reasons, the principals and practices of search engine optimization are changing as well. (Or should be, I guess there will forever be folks out there worried about their meta tags...)

A huge aspect of the change going on in search optimization is the death of simplicity. The algorithms we're being judged by are lot more complicated. The level of competition has increased 1000-fold in just 2 or 3 years. And we no longer want a lot of visitors, we want qualified prospects with a defined intent at the precise time that our information matches where they are in their buying process. These changes and dozens more like them alter the concept of 'being optimized'.

Aaron Wall covers one of the issues forcing change in this thought provoking post, which includes the following:

I frequently get asked to look at a page to see if I think it is perfectly optimized. But I rarely think you can tell if a page is perfectly optimized just by looking at one page. Most of the optimized pages I am asked to look at have no clear goal at hand. Is the page meant to be link bait? Am I supposed to buy from the page? How is the page integrated into your site?

There's a long trail where this idea leads. I hope to explore it here in the near future.