Guides
20
Character limits that actually matter in 2026
The real limits for title tags, meta descriptions, social posts and SMS - plus why Google measures pixels, not characters, and why emoji count as more than one.
3 min read
301 vs 302 redirects: which to use and what chains cost you
The difference between permanent and temporary redirects, when 307 and 308 apply, and why every extra hop in a chain is worth removing.
3 min read
Broken links: how much they matter, how to find them
What broken links actually cost you, how Google treats them, and the fastest way to find every one on a site without paying for a crawler.
3 min read
Core Web Vitals: what to fix first and what to ignore
LCP, INP and CLS explained with the thresholds that matter, the fixes that actually move them, and an honest account of how much they affect rankings.
3 min read
FAQ schema after the rich result: still worth it?
Why Google restricted FAQ rich results, what FAQPage markup still does for AI answers, and how to write questions worth marking up.
3 min read
Heading structure: one H1, descriptive H2s, and why
How to structure H1–H6 for search engines, screen readers and AI answer engines, and whether multiple H1s are actually a problem.
2 min read
Keyword density is not a target: what to check instead
Why keyword density stopped being a ranking factor, what percentage reads as stuffing to a human, and the on-page placement that still matters.
3 min read
llms.txt: worth adding, and honest about what it does
What the llms.txt proposal specifies, how it differs from robots.txt, whether any AI engine reads it yet, and what actually gets you cited in AI answers.
3 min read
noindex three ways: meta robots, X-Robots-Tag and robots.txt
The three mechanisms for controlling indexing, which one to use for which case, and the combination that accidentally keeps a page in the index forever.
3 min read
The meta tags that matter in 2026, and the ones that don't
Which meta tags affect rankings, which affect click-through, and which have done nothing for a decade - with the exact lengths and formats Google uses.
4 min read
Open Graph tags: the complete guide to link previews
Every Open Graph and Twitter card tag that matters, the exact image size each platform wants, and why your link preview still shows the old image.
4 min read
Programmatic SEO without getting your site deindexed
How to generate hundreds of pages from data without creating thin content - the quality gate, the index-bloat trap, and when programmatic SEO is the wrong tool.
3 min read
Readability and SEO: what a Flesch score really tells you
How Flesch Reading Ease is calculated, what score to aim for, whether readability affects rankings, and the one edit that improves it fastest.
3 min read
robots.txt: what it does, and the AI crawler question
How robots.txt actually works, why blocking a page does not remove it from Google, and whether you should block GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
3 min read
Schema markup: which types are worth adding in 2026
The structured data types that still produce rich results, the ones Google retired, and how to add JSON-LD without triggering a manual action.
3 min read
The SEO audit checklist for a small site, in 60 minutes
A concrete, ordered SEO audit for a site with under 50 pages - what to check, what a failure looks like, and what to fix first when everything is broken.
4 min read
SEO for SaaS: what moves the needle for a small product
A practical SEO plan for a small SaaS with no backlinks and no budget - what to fix first, what to ignore, and how long each thing takes to pay off.
5 min read
Sitemap best practices: the rules that affect indexing
What belongs in a sitemap, when to split it, how to use lastmod so Google does not ignore it, and how to read the coverage report it unlocks.
2 min read
Title tag length: the pixel limit nobody tells you about
Why 60 characters is a rough proxy for a pixel measurement, what Google actually truncates on, and why it rewrites roughly a third of titles anyway.
2 min read
XML sitemaps: what to include, and how to split them
How sitemaps actually affect indexing, which URLs belong in one, when to split into multiple files, and how to use them to diagnose coverage problems.
3 min read
About technical seo for indie saas
Most launch traffic is a spike. A product page gets a few thousand visits on the day it goes live, the referral trail dries up inside a week, and whatever the page earns after that comes from search. That second curve is the one technical SEO decides, and it is almost entirely won or lost in details nobody looks at on launch day: whether the title tag survives truncation, whether the canonical points at the version you want indexed, whether the same page is reachable at four URLs with four sets of query parameters.
The guides in this hub work through those details one at a time. They assume you already ship - that you can edit a template, add a header, or generate a sitemap - and skip the part where SEO is explained as a mystery. Where a claim is contested, the guide says which way the evidence points and how strong it is, because the honest answer to a lot of ranking questions is that the effect is real but small.
Answer engines changed the shape of this work rather than replacing it. Crawl rules, structured data and clean heading hierarchies now feed AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity as well as the ten blue links, and a page that is hard for a crawler to parse is hard for a model to cite. The same fixes serve both.
Common questions
- How long before technical SEO changes show up?
- Indexing changes such as canonicals and sitemaps land within days to a few weeks. Ranking movement from content and internal linking usually takes one to three months to read cleanly, and less if the site is small and crawled often.
- Does any of this matter for a product with ten pages?
- The crawl-budget parts do not. Titles, descriptions, canonicals, structured data and internal links all still do, and they are cheap to get right once at the template level.