The word is on the street: Google’s cool with your site being ‘search engine optimized’–but it’s not really going to care too much soon… there are just better ways to figure out if your site matters.

Amen, brother.

Here’s a bit from Matt Cutts at this year’s SXSW on what Google is going to be up to soon:

And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

This really makes a lot of sense–the site owner shouldn’t really be in control of his/her site’s ranking. It’s really the sum of the “market signals” that count.

So if you’re counting keywords, or going nuts exchanging links, you’re smoke. Get with the program: create great content and engage your community because Google’s brainiacs are seemingly omnipotent!

On a technical note, creating human-readable URLs and descriptive title and H1 tags still make sense because it’s about improving the human experience–not the bot experience.