Built to be found: a technical SEO checklist for new web apps

You can build a beautiful app that nobody ever finds. "Built to be found" is half our promise — and most of it is technical work done before launch, not marketing done after.

Start with the crawl

Search engines and AI crawlers can only rank what they can read. The non-negotiable foundation:

• A valid, auto-updating sitemap.xml listing every public URL.
• A robots.txt that invites crawlers rather than accidentally blocking them.
• Server-rendered HTML so content exists without running JavaScript.
• One canonical URL per page — no duplicate-content tax.

Metadata that earns the click

Titles and descriptions are the only copy you write for the search results page. Treat them like ad copy.

export const metadata = {
  title: "Apps built to be found, and built to last",
  description:
    "A Dubai engineering studio using AI to build production-grade apps.",
  alternates: { canonical: "/" },
};

Then make the share look as good as the page:

1. A unique Open Graph image per route.
2. A matching Twitter/X card.
3. Descriptive, human alt text on every meaningful image.

Speak the machines' language

Structured data turns a page into facts a machine can quote. We ship JSON-LD on every site:

• Organization and WebSite at the root.
• BlogPosting on articles, with author and dates.
• FAQPage wherever there's a genuine FAQ.

Rich results aren't a hack. They're you telling Google exactly what your page is, in a format it can't misread.

Speed is a ranking signal and a courtesy

Core Web Vitals are part of the algorithm — but they're mostly just respect for the visitor's time. Budget for them in CI and they stay fixed.

Get the foundation right once and discoverability compounds quietly, for years.