SEO, AIO, and GEO Best Practices in 2026

Fully Optimize Your Posts

• Make sure all posts are fully optimized:
  • SEO Headline (Page Title) and SEO Description (Meta Description) must be filled out properly, which is increasingly important for AI these days.
    • Use the right keywords and synonyms — no keyword stuffing.
  • Social Headline (og:headline) is filled out, which is important for social media and Google Discover.
  • Social Description (og:description) is optimized as well, such as a short summary of the post for social platforms.
  • Lead Image (or lead video) is populated. It should be high resolution with the proper image alt text filled in for accessibility.
    • Add 2–3 high-quality images to the body of the post (if it makes sense to do so).
  • Proper Linking to 4–6 good internal pages and 1–2 (or more) authoritative posts outside of your site.
  • Add Tags (keywords) to link your content together (4–6 is ideal, up to 10).

• As time goes on, look for opportunities to update old posts.
  • Update the Publish Date if significant updates and changes were made.
  • Publish the post and share it to social media to get the most traction. (It's okay to reshare it if it had been shared before. In fact, it’s encouraged to reshare posts multiple times.)
  • These posts might include dictionary-like or informative articles that you’re still making updates to and linking together.
  • Think of this like a web of articles, and how your content can support each other, especially through linking. Better linking is always a good opportunity.

Ways to Update the Content Body

• Update wherever you can to make the post current and feel like it was written today — not years ago.
  • High-quality multimedia makes your post a winner. Add 2–3 images, videos, and/or GIFs to the body, YouTube for songs, and fix any broken media.
  • Make sure all images have alt text.
  • Is the content easy to follow and understand in the way it's formatted?
  • Does it answer "W" questions such as who, what, where, when, and why? And how?
  • Does the advice/information change often? Make updates as needed.
  • Is there enough content on the page? (Sometimes evergreen pieces that are as long as 1,000–2000 words can be good.)
  • Other considerations:
    • Is this post a part of a content pillar? How does it link with other content? Add relevant links.
    • Compare your content against what’s ranking for your top keyword (check Google Trends as well), and work some of that language into the content.
    • Are there any angles, subtopics, or questions that you may have missed? Add an H2 or H3, and touch on them.
    • Check with AI for recommendations to improve the content. Use that as inspiration and a guide, but do not have AI rewrite it by itself (since that's too risky).
    • Remove dated references in the body's copy whenever possibly (phrases like “this year” or “last week”). Or, add new ones that make sense (which is helpful for freshness, especially for Google Discover).
    • Be comprehensive in updates, and add checklists or bullet points when possible for ease of reading.

Update Evergreen Articles

• Create a spreadsheet (if you don’t have one already) of your top articles over the past 6–12 months. Look for evergreen hits that would become even better with updates.
  • Ignore any super popular posts that show no signs of slowing down, since you don’t want to mess with a great thing. Consider those posts as fully optimized for now.
• Make the content even more useful to users. Be the most helpful content on the web for the search phrase the post is targeting.
• Add a Table of Contents if one doesn’t exist already. Reword subheadings for them to make sense in the "Table of Contents" format if needed.
• Consider adding subheadings (H2s/H3s) if they don’t exist already, with anchor/jump links if possible (similar to a Table of Contents). Think through the flow to ensure the user experience makes sense.
• Try to find anything to add to the context of the introduction so that you can mention something that is timely and current when you publish your updates.
• Keep the introduction succinct and limit the beginning to a few paragraphs (remove content if there are several paragraphs), so that you can get to the main content more quickly.
• Make sure the author listed is correct.
• Add image alt text.
• Republish with today’s date and add the URL to Google Search Console for a recrawl to speed up indexing across Google Search.

Build up Fresh Content

• “Freshness” is a growing word when it comes to content and content audits.
  • Google looks at freshness for both Search and Discover.
  • ChatGPT's support has also confirmed that freshness is a signal used when generating its responses.
• Can you make things you write about fun, entertaining, and informative?
  • See what your competitors are writing about and write about that, too.
  • Fresh content could give you a shot at new traffic from Google or the LLMs.

Utilize Google Trends as a Guide

• See what’s being listed as “Rising” related queries or “Top” queries on search pages like this one for Lady Gaga. (Pro Tip: Filter results to the last 30 days.) Know that these trends are dynamic and change from time to time. You might bookmark multiple and use the filters as needed.
  • Use related search terms as a guide when creating new content, especially for topics, people, places, organizations, or things you cover regularly.

Better Linking: SmartLinks

It’s critical to have a lot of linking across your site, both internally and externally. This is important to the user journey, the crawling of your site by search engines, and where your site stands in the web ecosystem. RebelMouse has a solution for this called SmartLinks.

How They Work: Set up a SmartLink once for a specific word or phrase. Whenever that word or phrase is mentioned in any of your posts (past, present, or future), the SmartLink will appear.

Exception: SmartLinks won’t ever override an existing link. You can also exclude a SmartLink by section or tag if you’d like.

Benefits of SmartLinks:

1. Great user experience with internal linking
2. Link to relevant posts
3. Increase time on site
4. SEO (tell Google which posts are important and which phrases/keywords your posts are related to — solidify search ranks for phrases that are doing well, and potentially improve them, too)

At RebelMouse, SmartLinks can be edited or changed at any time with the SmartLinks Dashboard.

Crafting Good Phrases/Keywords for SmartLinks

• Think of shorter keywords/phrases that you would use often.
• Think about if there’s a certain post, section, or tag page that you want to prop up.

Underperforming Content

Sometimes a story just underperforms, even when it's done well and fully optimized. There's a randomness to certain factors that are out of your control, such as (1) users' search habits, (2) how long a topic trends or has the public's attention, (3) how frequently a topic is a part of the public conversation, etc.

However, there are still some things that you can try (related to the other optimization tips in this article):

1. Make sure your post is fully optimized with all of things mentioned above (and listed below).
2. Adjust the headlines, including the Main Headline, Teaser Headline, Social Headline, and SEO Headline. Also consider updating the Descriptions (SEO and Social Description), especially if they’re poorly written or don’t explain the post well.
3. Update or replace the Lead Image to make it more compelling and “stand out” better as a thumbnail across social feeds, your website, Google Discover, etc.
4. Reword or rearrange the post body, including trying different subheadings or targeting long-tail search phrases that address people’s questions about the topic.
5. Adjust the tags, adding relevant ones or removing non-relevant ones.
6. Add more links, not just within the post, but from other related posts, to the new post (either SmartLinks or manual insertion in related stories).
7. Add Around the Web (external) links if they’re not already there, including at least one or two from authoritative websites on the topic.

In order of importance, most to least, these have a huge impact:

1. Main Headline (Page Title)
2. Lead Image
3. Social Headline (og:headline)
4. Links (inbound and outbound)
5. Meta/Social Descriptions

One other thing you might try is A/B testing. RebelMouse supports A/B Testing teaser headlines, which are headlines on section pages or your home page. You may have success A/B testing different headlines to see which ones convert better.