For years we have been telling clients that search engine optimization (SEO) it's not the "dark arts." It is too often treated as magical pixie dust that you sprinkle on a website after it launches. It is a subject wrapped in jargon and mystery that helps the "experts" sound more "expert." In truth, SEO is about creating great content that is relevant to your organization and its target market. The content answers real questions, solves real problems, and real human beings want to read it. In addition, an organization can encourage others to link to that content on their website. At the end of the day, that's it.

There are a collection of tools and best practices to make sure that the content on your website is set up to be as easy as possible for search engines to find and index. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are really more about providing visibility into what's happening with the content and health on your website rather than actually generating traffic. A good number of interGen clients are interested in taking things a few steps further. For these clients we employ a tool called AHREFS. The company is named for the HTML code used to create hyperlinks (e.g. <a href="https://intergen.org" target="_blank">My link to a great web developer</a>). Among many other things, they provide tools that show the "health" of a website, assessing things like how many dead links you have (404's), backlinks, page speed, etc. Pages with errors won't rank at Google. That is why cleaning up site health issues is often the first step in getting serious about using SEO to drive traffic to your site. If you are interested in deploying these tools to your site, let us know.

I created this post because there is currently a lot of conversation about how the use of artificial intelligence in Google search results is impacting how often those results drive traffic back to your site. The team at AHREFS does a beautiful job of explaining the basics of SEO and includes some those implications in the following video. It is a great watch for those interested in learning more about how SEO can help your site and what to expect. The thing I most appreciated is how focused the video is on remembering why we create websites and content in the first place. We are trying to help real people. Enjoy the video...