Search Engine Optimisation - The Interface Between Humans and AI

A friend and I had an exchange of comments earlier touching on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I realised that my response was likely to end up as an essay, so I thought I'd turn it into a post.

Let me start by saying that I've had very little formal SEO training. There are whole areas of SEO I'm unfamiliar with because I've never needed to use them. However, I've also spent nearly 20 years running my own e-commerce business, writing product descriptions, blog posts etc, finding out what works and what doesn't when my own money is on the line, and using a variety of tools designed to help analyse the SEO I've done.

In this post, I'm aiming to cover some general points on SEO, and highlight a few techniques that have worked for me.

Image by Firmbee from Pixabay

What is SEO

At it's core, SEO is the art of creating content in a way which gives you the best chance of being found by search engines and ranked as high as possible on their search results. I call it an art because although it's really a science, the search engines hide the details of their algorithms from ordinary users in an effort to prevent people gaming the system (which of course is exactly what we're all trying to do....)

Most of the SEO I do is aimed at Google because it's one of the most dominant, but there are lots of other search engines out there. Ebay and Amazon are effectively search engines. YouTube is owned by Google but uses a variant of their search engine. Brave, Microsoft, Presearch and other browsers have search engines, although many of them either piggyback off Google or follow virtually identical principles. Facebook, TikTok and X/Twitter are also primarily search engine driven.

The one thing that doesn't yet have an advanced search engine seems to be Hive. Right now, the in-site search is transparent but basic (actually, right now on PeakD it also appears to be down...). But I'm sure sooner or later someone will come up with a way to index Hive posts and Leo Threads in a more advanced way, so it doesn't hurt to bear SEO in mind a little when you post.

It's An Arms Race !

SEO is one of the biggest arms races in history.

You are trying to get your content found and ranked more highly than all the trillions of other items that have ever been created to clutter up the internet. If you've done a good job and a search engine finds what you've made, you are then in direct competition against anyone else globally who is talking about something similar. If you are selling products, you'll be up against companies with deep pockets and dedicated teams.

Finally, you'll be competing against not just all these humans, but against the AI driving the search engine itself. Their goal is simple; find content that looks like it's made by humans for humans, order it from best to worst, and eliminate anything that looks like it's malware or auto-generated. But they are machines (however advanced) so they follow complex automated rules to do all this.

Working out what those rules are and how to game the system is what SEO is all about. Search engine designers are continually tinkering with those rules with the precise intention of foiling any of us who get too good at gaming the system.

So it's a huge arms race with ever-changing goalposts. But humans can still win, even if only for a time 😀

A Few Useful Techniques

Here are a few basic things I've learned that can make a difference with SEO. They are mostly focused on e-commerce product descriptions and Google, because it's what I know best, but the principles will apply more generally.

Pick Relevant Keywords Or Key Phrases
Keywords in Google are like tags in Hive; having the right ones can make a huge difference, and in most cases there will be a field where you can specify them.

There are endless debates about whether long or short tail key phrases are better. Long tail key phrases will be found less often, but will be much better targeted at the audience; short tail ones or even single keywords will be found more easily but will be harder to rank highly against the broader competition.

Use Your Key Phrases Everywhere !
Once you've got your keywords or key phrases, I find there are some set ways to use them that really work.

• The post or product title should include them.
• Any images should include them in the Alt-text.
• They should be used in the meta description, ideally before the first comma
• They should be in the first sentence of any text, again ideally before the first comma.
• The post or product web link should include them (although this will normally be a lower case variant with hyphens instead of spaces).
• They should be repeated in the body text at least once every couple of hundred words - this is a balancing act you'll have to experiment with; too often or in the wrong place, and it'll look too blatantly like an attempt to write for the AI not the human audience.

Keep It Fresh
This applies more to product descriptions rather than blog posts, but most search engines love content that is kept up-to-date. I'll frequently go into product descriptions and tweak them a little. Even minor punctuation changes can be enough to show the search engine AI that you love your content and haven't just abandoned it. If I tweak 20 very slow selling products in a day, I can virtually guarantee that one of them will sell in the next 24 hours after months of no sales.

Write For Your Audience, But Think Of The AI
Where possible, put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience when you create content. Write at an appropriate level of complexity. But also remember that where you might have researched the subject matter and immersed yourself in it, they might not be so familiar. Without being condescending, explain any specialist acronyms or unusual concepts the first time you use them.

But while you should aim to create content that is human-friendly, because that is notionally what the AI's are looking for, you should also always bear in mind that the AI is just a collection of rules and checkboxes you're aiming to meet.

I mostly write in WooCommerce, and my SEO plugin of choice is Yoast SEO. What I particularly like is that as well as covering off the SEO basics, it has a "Readability" tab that can analyse my sentence structure to ensure it's not over-long, as well as the percentage of my text written in a passive rather than active voice.

So what do you think ? Do you ever consider SEO when you write a Hive post ?

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