stuarttrouton.com

Title, description, canonical, social tags — what search engines read first.

• Meta descriptionhigh impactlow effort

  Meta description is "Stuart Trouton helps companies figure out their AI strategy: which agents to build and how to tie them to business outcomes. Product manager for AI-driven vehicle homologation; 15+ years in supply chain, manufacturing, and operations." (234 characters)

  Search engines truncate descriptions past roughly 160 characters, and very short ones waste the snippet space that persuades searchers to pick your listing over the next one. Rewrite it to 70–160 characters: state what the page offers, work the primary keyword in naturally (matching words get bolded in results), and end with a benefit or call to action. Don't cram in keywords — the description influences clicks, not rankings, so write it for humans.

Headings, copy depth, images, structured data, internal linking.

• Internal linkingmedium impactmedium effort

  0 internal, 1 external links

  Search engines discover and rank your pages by following internal links; a page with none is a dead end for crawlers and visitors alike. Add contextual links to related pages on your own site — navigation, related-content sections, and in-body links all count. Aim for at least a handful of relevant internal links per page.

HTTPS, redirects, robots, sitemap, speed, crawlability.

• robots.txt present and permissivemedium impactlow effort

  no robots.txt found

  Without a robots.txt, crawlers assume everything is allowed — not fatal, but you lose the ability to keep them out of low-value areas (internal search results, carts, admin paths) and the standard place to advertise your sitemap. Create a plain-text robots.txt at the site root with at least a "User-agent: *" line and "Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml". Don't use it to hide sensitive URLs, though — the file is public, and disallowing a page doesn't remove it from the index; use noindex or authentication for that.

• XML sitemap availablemedium impactlow effort

  no sitemap.xml found

  Without an XML sitemap, search engines discover pages only by following links, so new, deep, or weakly linked pages get found slowly or not at all. Generate one at /sitemap.xml — most frameworks and CMSs have a generator built in or as a plugin — listing every canonical, indexable URL, then add "Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml" to robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console. Keep it clean: listing redirected, noindexed, or 404 URLs erodes crawler trust in the whole file.

• Response compression enabledlow impactlow effort

  no content-encoding header

  This HTML is served uncompressed, so every visitor downloads far more bytes than necessary — text compresses extremely well, and the savings directly speed up first render on slow connections. Enable Brotli or gzip on your server or CDN: in nginx it's "gzip on;" (or the brotli module), in Apache it's mod_deflate via .htaccess, and on most CDNs it's a single toggle. Make sure compression covers all text types (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, SVG), but skip already-compressed images — recompressing them wastes CPU for no gain.