SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization is the work of making a website easier for search engines to find, understand and rank, so that people searching for what it offers see it near the top of the results. The term is nearly as old as search itself, and much of what's written about it is folklore, but the substance for an online store is stable and small. Technical: can the engine reach and read every product page? Content: does each page state clearly what the product is and answer what shoppers search for? Authority: do other sites vouch for you? Everything else is detail on those three.

The AI era hasn't replaced SEO; it has added a fourth requirement on top of it. Every AI tool's retrieval step is still a search, so a page that doesn't rank is never retrieved to be considered. But once retrieved, the page must also be readable and quotable by a machine composing an answer — facts as text, structured data, direct answers to questions. Visibility Optimization is the name for doing all four together across a whole catalogue. Google's own SEO Starter Guide remains the best free introduction; it's short, honest, and free of folklore.