Robert Zaid, DO

Physician leader • Digital strategist • Author • Site optimization educator

I am a family physician and physician leader with a deep belief in longevity and meeting patients where they are — not where the system expects them to be. That philosophy carries directly into how I approach technology: practical, human-centered, and grounded in what actually works rather than what sounds impressive.

I started programming at age 10. That early exposure to how computers think — how they interpret instructions, what they can and cannot infer — has shaped every technology project I have worked on since, including this one.

I have been working with search engine optimization since 2008 — well before most people in the medical world were thinking about digital presence at all. Over nearly two decades I have watched search evolve from keyword stuffing to semantic indexing to the current AI-driven era, and I have adapted my approach at each stage.

I am also the author of The Business of Medicine — a guide for physicians navigating the business and operational realities of running a medical practice. Writing that book taught me that complex, technical knowledge can be made genuinely accessible without being dumbed down. That same principle drives every guide on this site.

The techniques on TeachMeOptimization are not theories I assembled from other sources. They are approaches I have tested, refined, and continue to use on real websites including this one.

The shift from traditional search to AI-powered answer engines happened faster than most website owners realized. One day your Google rankings were steady. The next, potential patients and clients were asking ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations — and your site was invisible to those systems, regardless of how well it ranked on Google.

I built this site because I saw that gap firsthand — in my own practice, in conversations with colleagues, and in watching how AI systems evaluated websites differently from traditional search engines. The information to bridge that gap existed but it was scattered, technical, and written for developers rather than for the people who actually run websites.

TeachMeOptimization is my attempt to translate what I know about AI search — built on two decades of SEO experience and a physician’s instinct for clear, practical communication — into guides that work for anyone willing to follow the steps, regardless of their technical background.

TeachMeOptimization covers six disciplines that together determine how visible your website is in AI-powered search — and how effectively it converts that visibility into an audience.