SEO & AEO Best Practices

Principles for optimizing content for both traditional search engines (SEO) and AI-powered answer engines (AEO). Includes Google's EEAT guidelines and structured data implementation.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

• Implementing metadata and Open Graph tags
• Creating sitemaps and robots.txt
• Adding JSON-LD structured data
• Optimizing content for featured snippets
• Preparing content for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.)
• Evaluating content quality using EEAT principles

Core Concepts

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Optimizing content to rank well in traditional search results (Google, Bing).

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Optimizing content to be selected as authoritative answers by AI systems.

EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Google's framework for evaluating content quality.

References

Start with the one reference that matches the task, such as technical SEO, structured data, EEAT, or AI-answer readiness. See references/ for detailed guidance:

• references/eeat-principles.md — EEAT implementation and author schema
• references/structured-data.md — JSON-LD patterns (Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb, Product)
• references/technical-seo.md — Technical SEO checklist (metadata, sitemaps, hreflang, robots.txt)
• references/aeo-considerations.md — AI/AEO considerations (AI Overviews, crawler management)