I had not needed SEO (Search Engine Optimization) until now. It’s part of my WordPress journey, how to find more people interested in STEM, the Engineering Process and learning how to use AI?
In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to index the world. They created a gogool of internet links to satisfy the needs of ‘people searching for providers of information’ and ‘providers searching for people who need information’. With Sheryl Sandberg‘s help they also created the revenue stream which financed the harvesting of internet links, and a whole lot more. Here’s the good part, both types of searching are free, contributing to the revenue stream is optional (I suppose it might insure prompt service.)
Discover
What can SEO do for me? And how? A few prompts to a bot revealed deep methodology and infrastructure used by search engines.
- Robots have been crawling the web since it was created.
- There is a symbiotic relationship between crawlers and the crawled. The crawled can prepare and give the crawlers what they want.
- Lists of search terms (questions) they have answers for. (Topic Hubs.)
- Maps of what information is where on the site (SiteMap.xml)
- Code (JSON-LD) indicating what the internal links are.
- Google Analytics is a set of free tools for tapping into who searched for what.
- Third parties (e.g. AlsoAsked.com) who scrape Google Analytics and create trees of how people’s queries progressed.
- Surely there is a lot more to be discovered
Learn
The extent and particularly the public availability of all this was a discovery for me. Getting the data is one thing, interpreting it is another.
I was able to see patterns in the data and ask the bot to cluster it into affinity groups, by giving examples. This simplified and structured the task of building content for WordPress.
Build
Now with clusters of queries I can ask the bot to create Topic Hubs with JSON-LD to give the crawlers what they need.
ChatGPT remembers the steps of the build workflow and execute it. Claude in Github Copilot created a 300 line python script, and said I would have to test, debug and run it myself. ChatGPT and I refined the workflow together, it was more learning for both of us. Human+Bot Veni, Vidi, Vici
Will the SEO work? I asked the bot, and it made a prediction. Bolder than Yogi Bera! Join 4-R-Forum and I’ll let you know.