Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com has a great interview with Matt Cutts via e-mail. In this interview, Matt answered some of the questions many SEO want to ask but really didn’t have the chance to.

He confirmed that using not all SEO is spam, in fact lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all.

Absolutely not — I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines–things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

It is important to stay out of black or even grey area (or step out if you’re in) and if you focus on targeting Google then the Google Information for Webmasters include some very digestable reading including a bulletted guideline to refer to.

Link: Matt Cutt Interview.