What Would the Computer Do? On SEO, AI, and Learning Foreign Languages
Talking to computers. That’s all that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is. And AI is just an outgrowth of SEO. Let me explain.
When you are implementing SEO on a website or writing an AI prompt, you are learning the computer’s language, the language that the software program or algorithm has been designed to understand so that your web page or YouTube video can be found more easily by your target audience.
Each time you sit down to write titles, hashtags, and meta descriptions to improve SEO on an article, you are writing and thinking in a sort-of foreign language. “How will my audience find this?” you will think as you craft your content and your excerpts. But also, “How will search engines understand these descriptions?”
Think of AI programs like ChatGPT and Jasper as the spawn of SEO. AI is like the algorithm’s favorite, highest-ranking articles, smashed together and spat back out.
AI writers are like SEO in reverse. Think about it. For years, we have been writing articles and then tweaking them at the end with SEO-friendly descriptions and image alt tags. With AI, we are writing the descriptions or prompts first in order to produce the article.
So now to produce something that is not banal, that is not in that almost-too-perfect AI output, you have to know the keys to writing the perfect meta description (or prompt).
FIVERR freelancers are already making a lot of money by writing custom prompts to generate incredible images or specific text for e-commerce product descriptions. Both Fiverr and Promptbase are helping businesses and freelancers find each other.
As I’ve gotten more into SEO over the years, as a result of having my own blogs and obsessing over their analytics, I’ve learned that SEO is just another foreign language to master or, at least, attempt to speak.
Before you start to think this sounds dystopian, that humans are starting to speak Robot (or a Robot version of each of the world’s languages in use on computer software), remember that actual humans writing code came up with hashtags and algorithms and AI learning.
I’m a writer and I don’t fear AI—I just think of it as a new language to understand.
AI and SEO can be boiled down to a chicken-and-egg story. That story has been around for thousands of years and in thousands of languages. And we still live with both eggs and chickens just fine.
Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT Is Such A Big Deal
OpenAI, which Elon Musk helped to co-found back in 2015, is the San Francisco-based startup that created ChatGPT.
