How to SEO and GEO Like it Matters

By Andrés Zapata, D.Sc. \ February 10, 2026

How idfive addresses SEO and GEO holistically

Search has changed. Ranking is no longer just about blue links. It’s about being findable, understandable, and referencable by both humans and machines. That includes traditional search engines (SEO) and generative engines that synthesize answers, summarize sources, and decide what gets cited (GEO). Despite the alphabet soup, the work nets out cleanly. Every effective SEO and GEO effort reduces to three dimensions: content, code, and hygiene. Get those right, and performance follows. Miss one, and the whole system underdelivers. We review and optimize across all three, deliberately and in sequence. Each website is different, and each deserves a distinct optimization strategy, but the moving parts (at least at the high level) are constant across the disciplines.

Content: What You Say and How Clearly You Say It

Content does the heavy lifting for both SEO and GEO. It answers questions, signals authority, and provides machines with content worth indexing and citing. To get the most out of content, we focus on:

• Intent alignment: Map pages to real user questions, not just keywords. Informational, navigational, and transactional intent all require different structures and depth.
• Topical authority over keyword stuffing: Build clear content clusters that show depth, relevance, and subject-matter credibility. One strong hub beats ten thin pages.
• Plain-language clarity: Write for humans first. Short sentences. Direct answers. Clear hierarchies. This improves engagement and makes content easier for generative models to extract and reuse.
• Answer-ready formatting: Use headings, bullets, tables, and summaries that make it easy for search engines and AI systems to understand what a page is about and why it matters.
• Freshness and completeness: Update high-value pages regularly. Fill gaps. Retire outdated content. Generative engines favor current, comprehensive sources.

Good content earns traffic. Great content earns trust and citations.

Code: How the Site Communicates With Machines

If content is the message, code is the delivery system. SEO and GEO both depend on how clearly your site communicates structure, meaning, and relationships. Our optimization work here focuses on:

• Semantic HTML and structure: Proper use of headings, lists, landmarks, and page structure so machines can reliably interpret importance and hierarchy.
• Metadata that actually works: Titles, descriptions, canonical tags, and indexation rules aligned to intent and page purpose, not defaults or legacy leftovers.
• Structured data where it counts: Schema that reinforces meaning, entities, and relationships. Not everywhere. Where it adds clarity and value.
• Performance and accessibility: Fast pages, stable layouts, and accessible markup improve crawl efficiency, engagement, and trust signals across both SEO and GEO.
• Clean internal linking: Logical pathways that help users explore and help engines understand what matters most.

Strong code doesn’t just help you rank, it helps you win. It helps bots and engines understand your content.

Hygiene: The Unsexy Work That Protects Performance

Hygiene is the quiet force multiplier. It doesn’t win awards, but it prevents slow leaks that quietly erode SEO and GEO gains over time. We audit and maintain:

• Indexation and crawl health: No orphaned pages. No accidental no-index tags. No bloated crawl paths wasting authority.
• Duplication and cannibalization: Consolidate overlapping content. Clarify ownership of topics. One page per job.
• Broken paths and technical debt: Fix 404s, redirects, outdated templates, and legacy scripts that dilute trust signals.
• Toxic Links and Domains: identify which domains are dragging your website’s Authority Score and disavow them to gain better SEO+GEO results.
• Consistency across environments: Align production, staging, and analytics so that what engines see matches what users experience.
• Measurement and feedback loops: Track what’s getting indexed, surfaced, cited, and ignored. Then adjust with intent.

Hygiene is how you keep momentum from slipping through the cracks. SEO and GEO are not separate strategies. They’re two outputs of the same system. When content is clear, code is intentional, and hygiene is disciplined, search engines rank you higher and generative engines trust you more. Visibility improves. Authority compounds. Performance becomes durable, not fragile.