Search Engine Tooling

When I first started as a software engineer, I was a search engine optimization expert. I do not remember those practices fondly.

Still, I want my site to be as helpful as possible to people, and to connect me with the most people/opportunities possible. And that means making it discoverable and favorable in the sites/tools that people use to find information/others.

So, her are the tools I am using for SEO these days. I don’t pay for any of it because that should not be required.

Just started Bing Webmaster Tools this week. My site report isn’t ready yet, takes a couple days. I don’t expect much to come of this, but I have noticed a decent amount of traffic from Bing searches.

Just started a Semrush account this week. It doesn’t seem super useful unless you pay a lot.

Started Ahrefs a couple months ago but nothing usable from it yet.

I’ve been using Google Search Console for a couple years and it is a barometer but not a tool for improvement. Google is so dominant that they can provide a good amount of detail but basically no control for you in this product. So I check it monthly.

I recently took some tips from Cassidy on getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools, creating an LLMs indexable page and adjusting my robots.txt. I haven’t noticed any change in traffic yet, about a week in. I guess I don’t really expect a huge change in traffic, but instead a better awareness of my work in LLM models/output. I’ll have to think of a way to test that in the future.