SEO guides

These eighteen guides cover the questions clients ask me most, written so you can act on them yourself. Each one is self-contained, with links to related guides and to the glossary for terms.

Indexing and audits

• How to read the Page indexing report in Search Console: what each exclusion reason means, which ones matter, and how to trace a count back to the template behind it.
• What a technical SEO audit should give you: how to tell a useful audit from a tool export, before and after you pay for one.

AI search and structured data

• The AI search readiness checklist: crawler access, server-rendered content, entities, answer-shaped pages, llms.txt, and measurement.
• The schema markup a small business actually needs: five types, example JSON-LD, and the rules that keep it accurate.

Migrations and performance

• Ten rules for 301 redirects that keep your rankings: inventories, one-to-one maps, chains, 410s, and bulk testing.
• Core Web Vitals in plain English: LCP, INP, and CLS, field versus lab data, and the fixes that usually work.

Your name, your entity, and AI answers

• How to correct what AI search says about you: trace each wrong fact to its source and publish corrections that stick.
• One person, two names: connecting a nickname, pen name, or formal name into a single entity with schema and sameAs.
• Proving expertise with third-party sources: alumni news, vendor case studies, old team pages, and bylines as evidence.
• How to write an About page that search engines and AI trust: current work first, verifiable facts, and no guesswork.

Domains, DNS, and files for machines

• Launch a site on a parked domain: Cloudflare DNS, GitHub Pages, HTTPS, and the caching trap.
• Lock down a domain that never sends email: null MX, SPF, DMARC, and an empty DKIM key.
• What happens to your old domains when they lapse: drop catchers, redirects to strangers, and how to protect yourself.
• How to write an llms.txt file: the format, Markdown copies, llms-full.txt, and robots rules.
• Meta keywords in 2026: ignored by Google, risky when stuffed, and how to use them honestly.
• Website accessibility without overlays: the WCAG essentials and how to test them yourself.
• Accessibility as SEO: how each WCAG fix pays off in rankings, AI answers, browsing agents, and trust.
• The Lynx test: see your site the way search engines and AI crawlers read it, in a text-only browser.

Reference

• Glossary of SEO and AI search terms: short definitions of the vocabulary used across this site, from AEO to XML sitemap.

Stay current

New and updated guides appear in the Atom feed. AI tools can read every guide as Markdown through llms.txt.

When a guide isn't enough

If you've worked through a guide and the problem is still there, that's usually the point where a second set of eyes on the actual site helps. Every engagement begins with a scoped audit; see the services or get in touch.

Updated October 6, 2026