You Can Drop SEO

I started learning web development around the time the term search engine optimization, SEO, was becoming more common. You could still see the shift between pre-SEO content and post-SEO content. A popular article titled "Forgotten" (a great story) was suddenly republished as "Forgotten: My Adventures as an Employee the System Forgot to Erase." Both titles and content were filled with keywords that signaled to search engines what the page was about. Articles basically catered to the search engines and only incidentally served people. On my own website, I remember editing page titles several times, then waiting a few days to see if Google noticed the changes and ranked me better. In fact, before Google introduced personalized results, I built a tool at my job to track how our website ranked for different combinations of keywords. When personalized search results arrived, a lot of tools became obsolete. It was still useful, though, to track keywords for generalized metrics. But now AI…