Scorecard at delivery
This is an internal self-assessment of what is implemented on the live WordPress site (Yoast-driven) against the practices Google Search, Bing, and modern LLM retrievers reward in 2026 — a checklist, not a measured benchmark. A small readability tail remains amber (around 36 items — real bios and short product pages), which the scores below reflect honestly.
Semantic HTML, single H1 per page, Yoast focus keyphrases, unique meta descriptions, accessible navigation. A handful of items sit amber on readability (real bios, short product pages).
Yoast schema.org JSON-LD for Organisation, Person, ResearchProject, ScholarlyArticle, NewsArticle, BlogPosting, Product, BreadcrumbList.
Yoast XML sitemaps (EN + PT), a permissive robots.txt, IA-aligned URLs, 301 redirects from the old site, canonicals and hreflang on every page.
Dense cross-links via the content + sidebar pattern. Every detail page links to at least three related entities.
Immutable caching + gzip on assets; hero image cut 418 KB → 289 KB; oversized images downscaled (~-89%) with responsive srcset. Brotli and AVIF pending host configuration.
Blog shipped with 20 posts at delivery. To sustain SEO momentum the cadence is ~2 posts / week of relevant, unique content.
Alt text on every meaningful image, ARIA landmarks, focus-visible, WCAG AA palette, skip-link, reduced-motion.
On-site signals are clean; off-site backlinks come with time. Targeted PR for each major release is the lever.
What was implemented, concretely
Recommendations for the next sprint
-
Author pages as hubs. Add
/blog/by-author/[slug]/and schema.orgauthoron every post. Raises E-E-A-T signals. -
Tag archive pages.
/blog/tag/[tag]/aggregates posts. Each archive page has a unique intro paragraph, not just a list. -
Rich snippets for FAQ / HowTo. Where we have step-by-step tutorials (e.g. prompting templates, MLOps checklists), emit
HowToandFAQPageschema. -
Brotli + AVIF on the host. Responsive
srcsetand downscaled images already ship; enabling Brotli compression and AVIF delivery (pending host configuration) is the next performance gain. - Clear the readability tail. Bring the ~36 amber Yoast items (real bios, short product pages) to green by lengthening copy and tightening focus keyphrases.
-
RSS + JSON Feed. Publish
/blog/feed.xmland/blog/feed.json. Syndication still matters for researcher audiences. -
Content hubs by topic. A
/topics/[slug]/landing page that bundles research area + thematic + blog + news in a single topic-scoped view. Excellent for LLM-driven search. - Add analytics, then a review cadence. Install a RGPD-friendly analytics tool (Plausible/Matomo) to measure the KPIs, then review referrers, top pages, and 404s weekly. Kill dead URLs, redirect what still gets traffic.
- Translate flagship posts into PT. A handful of high-traffic posts with canonical hreflang alternates boost Portuguese-speaking reach.
- Link velocity, not volume. Each major research release gets a co-ordinated press + social + partner post; that builds the off-site graph Google actually ranks.
A word on LLM-first search
Traditional SEO still matters, but 2026 traffic is increasingly mediated by LLM-backed search (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT Search). The site is optimised for that too:
- Clear entity identity. The home page and About page declare LIACC precisely (name, parent, location, ratings). Schema.org carries the same facts.
- Consistent entity mentions. Every author's name is spelled the same, every project has a canonical slug. LLM retrievers collapse duplicates easily when the surface is clean.
- Direct, cite-able prose. Blog posts lead with a short lead paragraph. LLM answer boxes lift those.
- No hidden text, no cloaking. What a user sees is what a model sees.