Make it discoverable — then keep expanding it

Once the website, Reza and the build journal were working, the next question changed from “Does the site work?” to “Can search engines understand and discover it?” That started the first SEO pass.

1. Write a unique search title and description for every important page. The homepage, Career, Recommendations and How We Built It now each explain their purpose to search engines.
2. Choose one canonical URL for each page. Clean URLs such as /career and /how-we-built-it are the preferred versions, while old .html URLs redirect to them.
3. Add structured data. Schema markup describes the site, my professional profile, the build journal article and page breadcrumbs in machine-readable form.
4. Create a sitemap and robots file. Search engines now have a clear list of the public pages to crawl, while admin and data routes are excluded from crawling.
5. Improve social previews. Open Graph and social-card metadata were added so shared links can show a branded title, description and image.
6. Reduce homepage weight. The profile image was moved out of a large inline data block and into a normal cached image file.

The next step was moving from “SEO is installed” to “Google can actually verify, discover and crawl the site.” We connected the domain to Google Search Console and completed the first indexing workflow from the phone.

1. Verify ownership through DNS. Google provided a TXT verification record, which we added to the domain DNS in Vercel.
2. Confirm the Domain property. Google Search Console verified rouzbehsalehinia.com, giving us visibility into how Google sees the entire domain.
3. Submit the sitemap. https://rouzbehsalehinia.com/sitemap.xml was accepted successfully so Google has a clear map of the public site.
4. Request indexing for the key pages. The homepage, Career, Recommendations and How We Built It were each added to Google’s priority crawl queue.

Phase 2 expanded beyond search discovery and added a new public section: Thoughts when driving blog. The goal is to give real ideas a permanent place on the website instead of letting them disappear into a social-media feed.

1. Add a permanent public blog page. Published thoughts now live on the website as part of the portfolio.
2. Build a private owner publishing workflow. The same private owner-access pattern used elsewhere on the site opens a secure author studio without exposing the admin workflow publicly.
3. Publish from the phone. A post can be written or dictated, categorized, saved as a draft, published, edited, unpublished or deleted without touching GitHub.
4. Store the content in Supabase. New posts remain on the site without rebuilding the static website every time.
5. Clean up navigation. “Thoughts when driving blog” was added as a normal navigation item, while “How We Built It” remains the one highlighted build-journal button.

The next upgrade was allowing a thought to carry its own visual evidence. Blog posts can now include photos directly from the author studio instead of requiring a separate website upload.

1. Add photos from an iPhone. Images can be selected while writing a post and uploaded through the protected author workflow.
2. Support multiple images. A post can contain up to eight photos, with one selected as the featured image.
3. Control presentation. Photos can be reordered or removed before publishing, and captions and alt text can be added when useful.
4. Keep the site fast. Images are compressed before upload and stored in a dedicated Supabase Storage bucket rather than embedded into the page.

On September 15, 2026, we finished the booking workflow that had been on the Phase 2 roadmap. A visitor can now ask Reza to schedule time with me and be sent to a real Google Calendar appointment page rather than a one-time calendar link.

1. Create a permanent 30-minute appointment schedule. Google Calendar now provides the live availability page.
2. Respect existing commitments. Busy times are automatically unavailable for booking; visitors see availability, not the private details of calendar events.
3. Add Google Meet. Successful bookings create a calendar invitation with video conferencing.
4. Collect useful context. The booking form asks for contact information, what the visitor would like to discuss and optional company/organization information.
5. Teach Reza scheduling intent. Requests such as “book a meeting,” “schedule time,” “calendar,” or “can I talk to Rouzbeh?” now route visitors to the live booking experience.