SEO

SEO is the practice of shaping pages, and the sites they sit on, so search engines can crawl them, work out what they’re about and rank them for the searches they respond to. It covers technical foundations, page structure, metadata and links, but most of it comes down to content that answers the need behind a search. The term dates from around 1997, when early search engines made ranking worth competing for.

Search engines work in stages. Crawlers follow links to discover pages. Indexing analyses each page’s text, images and metadata and stores what it’s about. Ranking picks the most relevant, useful results for a query from that index, weighing many signals. The results page then shows a title, a link and a snippet, often drawn from the page’s meta description or its own text, and sometimes a featured answer or an AI-generated overview.

At its best, SEO overlaps with good content design. At its worst, it produces pages written for imagined algorithms, stuffed with repeated phrases and remarkably reluctant to offer anything useful.

Why it matters for content

Search is a major route into websites, and much of what helps is editorial: a title that says what the page is about in the words people search with, a meta description that tells people what they’ll get, headings that describe each section, internal links with descriptive text and content that meets the intent behind a query, whether that’s a quick fact, a set of steps or a comparison.

Research into search language can reveal how audience segments describe their needs, which may differ from organisational terminology. That evidence should improve content, not merely be inserted as keywords.

Some practices do harm. Keyword stuffing makes text worse for readers and is treated as spam. Producing large numbers of thin pages, by template or by AI, to catch every variation of a query is what Google’s spam policies call scaled content abuse, and it can drag down a whole site. Google’s Panda update in 2011 was an early example of a search engine acting against content farms.

SEO also includes maintenance: redirects, duplicate handling, structured data and preserving useful routes during migrations. Rankings aren’t the only measure. The outcome that matters is whether the right people find accurate content and complete their task.

How AI changes the picture

AI search and answer systems may summarise content without sending every reader to the page. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, extends the same concerns to those answers, asking whether a source is selected, represented accurately and cited, not just where it ranks. Clear, original and well-structured sources become more important, while generic search filler has less reason to exist.

Making authority, dates and key claims explicit helps systems interpret the material, though dates and fields don’t guarantee that a generated answer will be accurate. Nor is there much to gain from chasing every new acronym with another layer of mechanically optimised prose.

AI can assist with query research, metadata and audits, but it can’t manufacture experience, evidence or trustworthiness.