The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What are your strategies for SEO?
SEO is dead; Long live $EO.
On a good day, Search Engine Optimization was always more an art than a science. On a bad day, I’d say it was nothing more than a scam.
My experience with SEO and SEO ‘experts’ goes back to the 1990s. During the ‘dot com bubble’ I was working for one of Canada’s premier digital media companies.
Yes, we were one of those places you read about, where nerf guns were widely distributed and often used; one of those places where Friday afternoons always turned into LAN parties, often Mech Warrior, or later, Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena. Our company would send us to Montreal to blow off steam at raves. The company also paid for a masseuse to visit every few weeks.
I remember when SEO suddenly became a thing. I remember how poorly SEO-dedicated firms were at performing professionally. I remember how even then insiders would shrug if they somehow managed a successful campaign – was it because of the SEO, or just because the supporting traditional media had found the right audience?
Eventually, we decided that SEO firms weren’t worth the bother, and our clients still had wildly successful launches and campaigns.
Later, working as a one-man promotion team for an educational charity in southern Africa, I had to learn all the meta tags and the optimal values to put into them. And, as I suspected, there was no ‘right’ way to do it. Every guide differed in what it recommended, every search engines differed in what it wanted. Even then, if you focussed on one search engine, they’d suddenly change what they expected. SEO was somewhere between hocus-pocus and pure luck.
So I disconnected from the concept of SEO. None of my personal sites focus on it. It’s not important. Even without an SEO, the Saipan tourism board found my blog post* about vacationing in Saipan, linked to it from their site and drove a lot of views my way. If your content was unique, you didn’t need to worry about SEO.
And now, with the way Google and other search engines have embraced AI summaries, SEO is even less important. The AI is going to steal your content and work hard to keep your audience for themselves: You’re not getting the eyeballs from search engines anymore.
So why worry about SEO? It’s dead. Google killed it. The only Search Engine Optimization that works now is to purchase a slot nearest the AI summary and hope someone looks that far down the page.
===
*I had a blog called Vicarious Vistas that chronicled my travels around the Pacific and eventually into Africa.