When a website can’t be found in search, it almost doesn’t matter how good it is. Making sure search engines can find and understand a site is what SEO — search engine optimisation — is for.
It has a reputation for being technical and a little dark-arts, but most of what matters is surprisingly ordinary: clear titles, a short description for each page, a few tags that tell search engines what they’re looking at, and a simple map of the site. It’s mostly just markup — and markup happens to be something AI is good at. You can ask an assistant to add nearly all of it for you, and keep your own attention on what the page actually says.
Search engines can’t send anyone to a page they don’t know exists.
So, the same way I’d added security layers, I worked through the search side. Here are the five steps that seemed to help most, in plain English — plus a sixth for the way AI is starting to change search.
Titles & descriptions — what search shows
The clickable headline and the grey summary line under it. Every page gets its own, written around the words people really type. Leave it out, and the search engine guesses for you — usually less well.
Structured data — labels machines can read
Invisible tags (in a format called JSON-LD) that spell out what a page is — a person, an article, an FAQ. It helps a search engine, or an AI answer, tell who wrote what — and is a bit more likely to get it right.
A sitemap & a robots file — a map for crawlers
A plain list of every page (the sitemap), and a short note saying “you’re welcome to look around” (robots.txt). Together they hand search engines a map instead of making them guess their way through.
Real pages, not in-app routes
A lot of AI-built sites keep everything behind one web address with a # in it. Search engines can’t file those away as separate pages, and shared links preview badly. Giving each post its own real, permanent URL probably made the biggest difference for a small site like mine.
Link previews — how it looks when shared
The title, blurb and image that appear when someone drops your link into WhatsApp or LinkedIn. A few “Open Graph” tags and one 1200×630 image decide whether a shared link looks deliberate, or like a broken scrap.
BonusOne more layer
Writing for AI answers, not just blue links
Search is changing: a search engine now answers a lot of questions itself, right at the top, and tools like ChatGPT do too. They quote pages that are easy to lift from — so I open each post with a two-or-three-sentence direct answer, keep paragraphs short, and add a small FAQ marked up for machines. It feels a bit like writing a good executive summary: lead with the answer, then back it up.
None of this made me an SEO expert, and it doesn’t need to. Most of it was fairly unglamorous setup — much of which an AI can handle — followed by the slower, harder part: publishing things worth reading, and giving search engines time to notice. Build it, secure it, then try to make sure it can be found.
No coding required. Paste this into your AI tool to add the same steps to your own site: