The question often comes up when you start talking about search engine optimization; “But isn´t that cheating?” The answer is honest enough. However, it stems from old practices and misconceptions about SEO.
SEO used to involve such practices as stuffing the website´s META tags full of popular but irrelevant keywords, or including “white words” (keywords scattered throughout the page in text the same color as the background. For example, irrelevant but popular keywords in white on a white background; hence the name “white words”).
No doubt SEO would still use such shady practices, if it could, but search engines have wised up. Spiders can detect things like keyword stuffing and white words, and websites that employ them are more likely to get blacklisted than indexed.
A newer kind of SEO cheating comes in the form of “link farms”, sites whose only existence in life is to provide backlinks (generally for a fee) to websites, since backlinks are one of the things that determine a webpage´s page rank. But search engines are rapidly getting wise to that, as well, and often backlinks from these link farms don´t count for as much as the webowner thinks they ought to.
This discussion of SEO as a cheater always looking for a way to get around the measures the search engines have in place to prevent cheating would be depressing, if that were all SEO is. But it isn´t.