Elyra Sjá · Course

Freddy the Optimizer

The sequel to Freddy the Notetaker. The app is built, tested, reviewed and shipped — and for three months, almost nobody has come. This course is the fourteen chapters that fix that: from a site nobody can find to one that search engines rank, answer engines cite, and a schedule keeps honest.

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14 chapters · from launch day · free

The 14 chapters
  1. 01 The Silence After Launch Freddy shipped in March. By June the analytics dashboard shows forty visits a week, thirty of them Freddy's author checking that the site is still up. This chapter is about why that happens to good products, and what the first real measurement should be.
  2. 02 The Workspace Ten minutes of setup that decides what the next thirteen chapters can do. The important decision is not the install; it is telling the project where your source code lives, and understanding which capabilities cost money and which do not.
  3. 03 The First Honest Look One page, one question, one score. This chapter is about the launcher and about reading a report properly: which numbers are causes, which are symptoms, and why the objective you pick changes what the score even means.
  4. 04 What the Model Actually Sees Your page is 2,400 words of carefully arranged HTML. An answer engine reduces it to a few hundred words of plain text and reads until its budget runs out. This chapter is about seeing exactly what survives that reduction, because almost nobody has.
  5. 05 Fixing the Page Knowing what is wrong is half the job. This chapter is the other half — done twice, once without spending anything and once with an agent editing your repository — and then the part nobody does: measuring again.
  6. 06 Letting the Robots In A perfect page that a crawler cannot fetch scores zero where it counts. This chapter is about permission — who is allowed to read you, who thinks they are, and the two traps that silently block the engines you most wanted.
  7. 07 Who Is Behind This Page Two pages answer a question equally well. One is cited, the other is not. The difference is usually not the prose — it is that one page says who wrote it, in a form a machine can resolve, and the other is anonymous.
  8. 08 The Whole Site Four chapters of single-page work have taught you what good looks like. Now the same rigour across every page at once — and a class of problem that only exists at site scale, which no amount of looking at one page will ever reveal.
  9. 09 llms.txt and the Link Plan Two things the crawl makes possible, both generated rather than written: a file that tells answer engines what your site contains, and a plan for the internal links you are missing — including an honest list of the pages where none belongs.
  10. 10 Are We Cited? Everything so far has been prediction: signals that should make you citable. This chapter stops predicting. You put the question from chapter 1 to four answer engines and read what they say — including the name of whoever they cited instead of you.
  11. 11 Did the Crawlers Come? Chapter 6 was about permission in principle. This is about what happened in fact. Your access log is the only place on the internet that records whether the engines you care about actually came, and almost nobody reads it.
  12. 12 Keeping It Optimisation decays. Not gradually and gracefully — suddenly, on the Tuesday somebody ships a redesign. This chapter is about finding out on Tuesday rather than in November.
  13. 13 The Gate A monitor tells you the site broke. A gate stops it breaking. This chapter puts Sjá in the pipeline, where the cost of a mistake is a failed build rather than a quarter of lost traffic.
  14. 14 The Rhythm The work is done. This chapter is about the three things that keep it done: showing it to somebody who does not use the tool, comparing your score against Google's own numbers, and a monthly rhythm short enough that you will actually keep it.