XML Sitemaps: What They Do and How to Build One That Works
A sitemap tells search engines which pages you care about. Here is what belongs in one, what does not, and how to tell whether yours is doing anything at all.
Guides
Everything below is written for people who look after a website and would rather not wade through an SEO blog to find one straight answer. No jargon for its own sake, no padding, and no pitch at the end.
Start with whichever problem you have. If you are not sure where to begin, the technical SEO audit walks the whole site in order and points at the rest as it goes.
Noindex vs Robots.txt Disallow: Which One You Actually Need
These two look like they do the same job. They do not, and using the wrong one is how pages end up stuck in Google with no description.
Canonical Tags: Fixing Duplicate Content Without Losing Rankings
One page reachable at five URLs splits your signals five ways. The canonical tag is how you tell Google which one counts.
Crawl Budget: What It Is and When You Should Care
Most sites never hit a crawl limit. Some hit it every day. Here is how to tell which one you are, and what to do about it.
Meta Robots Tags: A Plain-English Reference
Noindex, nofollow, noarchive, max-snippet and the rest, what each one actually does, and the combinations that cancel each other out.
Redirects for SEO: 301, 302 and the Ones That Cost You Traffic
Picking the wrong redirect type, or chaining five of them together, quietly leaks rankings. A guide to doing it properly.
HTTP Status Codes Every Site Owner Should Recognise
What 200, 301, 404, 410, 500 and 503 tell a crawler, and why a soft 404 is worse than a real one.
The Right Robots.txt for a WordPress Site
WordPress ships a virtual robots.txt that is fine for most sites. Here is when to replace it, what to add, and what to leave alone.
Google Search Console: Setting It Up and Reading What Matters
Verification, submitting a sitemap, and the four reports worth checking regularly. Everything else can wait.
A Technical SEO Audit You Can Do in an Afternoon
A working checklist for one site, in order, using free tools. No agency retainer required.
Try the generator
Reading about robots.txt is one thing, writing it correctly is another. The robots.txt generator on the home page builds the file for you, runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.