I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing Dixon Jones, who, like myself, has been in the SEO game for almost three decades. Dixon wears many hats, including being CEO of Inlinks, a company that has developed the first entity-based Semantic SEO tool, as well as board member at ZEN, a SAAs solution that is streamlining website compliance challenges within the pharmaceutical industry.
Dixon and I trade notes on current developments in SEO with a focus on the significant impact that AI is already having in the space. We cover many topics in our talk, including:
- The degree to which traditional SEO link building strategies will remain viable.
- How Dixon’s current project, Inlinks — an SEO technology that focuses on entities instead of words –provides value.
- How LLMs are voraciously ingesting content across the public web, including YouTube transcripts, and their continuing hunger for additional human-generated content.
- How forward-looking SEOs have moved from a keyword-centric mentality to a topic-centric focus.
- The wisdom of making one’s brand closely aligned with the exact same things that one’s customers are interested in.
- How Google Suggest can be used to generate new content ideas by analyzing related search terms and their semantic context.
- The importance of identifying the relationship between the person talking and their area of expertise in order to estimate this individual’s authority and credibility.
- The efficacy of applying a “Barnacle SEO” strategy in today’s search environment, where LLMs and single-result search engines such as Perplexity are growing more important.
- The potential for LLMs to successfully disambiguate certain terms (such as “Mustang,” which may indicate a vehicle, a fighter aircraft, or a type of horse).
- The fact that today’s current generation of AI-generated content checkers often fail to perform correctly.
- The degree to which blockchain technology may have a role in authenticating content in the future.
- How companies such as Adobe may be in a better position to survive potential copyright infringement lawsuits related to AI, given that the images used to train its LLM have all been licensed.
- The dubious wisdom of attempting to quarantine one’s content against LLM ingestion.
- How a new generation of JavaScript-based SEO tools may be able to implement needed site changes rather than merely point them out.
