SEO for the Long Long Ago and Right Now

In the long long ago, before the great AI wars, SEO was easier. People submitted sitemaps to search engines (there were lots of them back then). And there were these things called directories where people could submit sites - and other people could find them. I'm looking at you Yahoo. Those days are long gone though.

I'm trying to figure out how to generate traffic these days, and it's not easy. Google and Bing are the only places to submit a sitemap anymore. No guarantee they'll choose to index your content though. Directories don't exist - unless you count the thousand different "product launch" sites that want to charge $40 for a backlink. Maybe there's a secret to it, maybe I'll find it. But I kinda miss the long long ago.

What actually works?

AI tells me that SEO (and now GEO) stopped being a list of tricks and became a practice. Supposedly, if you ship good content and make your site understandable to search engines, you've already won half the battle. They say that if you do the following, you'll be in good shape:

• Generate a sitemap.xml and keep it current. Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. They may or may not index, but it’s a minimum requirement.
• Expose a robots.txt at the site root. Block only what you truly don’t want crawled (staging, internal APIs).
• Use canonical URLs for duplicate pages. Don’t let the same content live at twenty different query-string permutations.
• Use unique, descriptive <title> and <meta name="description">.
• Semantic headings (h1, h2), clean URLs, and readable content. Humans first, bots second.
• Earn real backlinks (guest posts, helpful tools, honest content). Paid-link farms are a waste or a penalty.
• Share smartly on social; social signals may not be direct ranking factors, but they get eyeballs and links.

Final, slightly bitter thought

SEO isn't magical. It's steady work: write for humans, make pages crawlable, be patient, and don’t pay for 'launch directories'. If you want a shortcut, there isn’t one - except doing the things the long long ago folks did, but better.

SEO: part science, part patience, part stubbornness. Ship good content and let the crawlers argue about it.