Design & SEO

Technical SEO: The Foundation That Gets You Found

Technical SEO is the invisible architecture behind every high-ranking website. It has nothing to do with keyword stuffing or writing blog posts for the sake of word count. It is the structural work that determines whether search engines can crawl, index, and understand your site in the first place. I treat technical SEO as a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought bolted on after launch.

Crawlability and Indexation

If Googlebot cannot crawl your pages efficiently, nothing else matters. I audit and configure robots.txt directives, ensure clean URL structures with no duplicate content traps, and set up proper canonical tags so search engines know exactly which version of a page to index. Every site I build gets an XML sitemap that is automatically generated and submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. I also handle pagination signals, hreflang tags for multilingual sites, and crawl budget optimization for larger sites where unnecessary pages can dilute indexing priority.

Meta Tags and On-Page Signals

Every page gets a unique, descriptive title tag and meta description written to communicate value to both search engines and the humans reading them in search results. I configure Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags so your content looks polished when shared on social media. Heading hierarchy is structured logically — a single H1 per page, with H2s and H3s that break content into scannable, semantically meaningful sections. I also ensure image alt attributes are descriptive and contextual, not just filed with generic placeholder text.

Sitemaps, Robots, and Internal Linking

A well-structured internal linking strategy does more for your rankings than most people realize. I build navigation and content structures that distribute link equity effectively across your site. Breadcrumb navigation, contextual links within body content, and footer links all play a role. I configure XML sitemaps with proper priority and change frequency hints, and I set up robots.txt files that allow crawlers to reach important pages while blocking thin or duplicate content from wasting crawl budget.

Structured Data and Schema Markup

Structured data is how you communicate directly with search engines in their own language. By adding JSON-LD schema markup to your pages, you give Google and Bing explicit signals about what your content represents — whether it is a local business, a product, a FAQ, a review, an event, or an article. This is what powers rich results: those enhanced search listings with star ratings, pricing, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumb trails, and business information that take up more visual space in search results and drive higher click-through rates.

I implement schema markup on every project as standard practice. For local businesses, that means LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService schema with accurate NAP (name, address, phone) data, opening hours, and service areas. For e-commerce sites, I add Product schema with pricing, availability, and review aggregation. I use BreadcrumbList schema to generate breadcrumb trails in search results, FAQPage schema for frequently asked questions, and Article or BlogPosting schema for content-driven sites. Every implementation is validated against Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org documentation to ensure there are no errors or warnings that would prevent rich results from appearing.

I also monitor structured data performance in Google Search Console to track which rich results are being generated, which pages have errors, and where there are opportunities to add new schema types that could improve visibility.

Design Systems That Scale

For businesses that are going to grow — adding new pages, new features, new product lines — a design system is not a luxury. It is an investment that pays for itself within the first few months. I build design systems that include a documented component library, a defined set of patterns for layout and interaction, and clear guidelines for extending the system without breaking consistency.

A well-built design system means new pages can be assembled from existing components in hours instead of days. It means every developer who touches the codebase produces work that looks and feels consistent. And it means design reviews become faster because the foundational decisions have already been made and documented.

I deliver design systems as both Figma libraries and code component libraries, depending on the tech stack. The two stay in sync because they are built from the same token definitions, and I document every component with usage guidelines, accessibility notes, and example implementations.

AI Search Optimization (AEO & GEO)

Search behavior has changed. A growing share of questions never reach a list of blue links at all — they get answered directly by an AI assistant or an AI overview at the top of the results. If your business is invisible to those systems, you lose the customer before the click was ever available to win.

This discipline goes by several names — Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, or simply AI search visibility. The goal is different from classic SEO: instead of ranking a page, you are trying to be the source an AI system retrieves, trusts, and cites when it composes an answer.

A lot of what works is familiar. Clean semantic HTML, fast pages, and structured data matter more than ever, because a machine assembling an answer needs to parse your content unambiguously. Content organized around real questions with direct answers gets extracted; marketing copy that takes four paragraphs to say what you do gets skipped. Consistent facts across your site, your sameAs profiles, and third-party listings are what let a system resolve you as a specific entity rather than a name it cannot verify.

Some of it is genuinely new. llms.txt is an emerging convention — a plain-language file that tells AI systems who you are, what you do, and which pages matter, in a format built for machine consumption rather than crawling guesswork. AI crawler access is now a deliberate decision: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended each read your robots rules, and blocking them is a legitimate choice that also removes you from those answers. I make sure that is a decision you made on purpose rather than a default someone inherited.

This is not theory here. This site publishes its own llms.txt and full AI reference, and I built the free tools that audit this exact thing — an AI discoverability checker, an agent-readiness audit, and an AI permissions auditor. You can run them against your own site right now, for free, before you talk to me about anything.

What I Do for AI Visibility

• Entity-grade structured data with a complete, verifiable sameAs profile set
• An llms.txt and machine-readable reference describing your business
• Deliberate AI crawler policy in robots.txt, per bot, decided rather than inherited
• Content restructured into question-and-answer form that extracts cleanly
• Consistent business facts across your site, listings, and social profiles

Accessibility & WCAG 2.2

Roughly one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability. An inaccessible site turns that away silently — no complaint, no bounce report you would recognize, just revenue that never happened. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the standard I build to, and it is the benchmark courts and procurement departments reference.

There is a legal dimension worth naming plainly: web accessibility lawsuits are filed by the thousands every year, they overwhelmingly target small and mid-sized businesses, and settling one costs far more than building the site correctly in the first place. But the honest reason to do it is that it is the difference between a customer being able to buy from you and not.

In practice this means semantic HTML that assistive technology can navigate, every interactive element reachable and operable by keyboard alone, visible focus indicators that survive the design review, color contrast that meets the ratio rather than approximately meeting it, real labels on every form field, error messages that are announced rather than only shown in red, alt text that conveys meaning instead of restating the filename, and ARIA used only where semantic HTML genuinely cannot express the pattern.

I test with actual keyboard navigation and a screen reader, not just an automated scan. Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues — they will tell you a button has no accessible name, but not that your tab order jumps around the page or that a modal traps a keyboard user with no way out. I use them as a first pass, not as a verdict.

The overlap with SEO is not a coincidence, either. Proper heading hierarchy, descriptive link text, semantic landmarks, and alt attributes make a page more legible to a search crawler and an AI system for exactly the same reasons they make it usable with a screen reader.