Guides

Guides written from client work, not from a content brief

32 guides on technical SEO, AI search, e-commerce builds and hiring a developer. No email gate, no downloadable PDF, no course. If a guide describes a mistake, it is usually one I have found on a real site — including this one.

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These guides cover four areas: technical SEO, AI search and answer engines, e-commerce builds, and buying development work safely. Each cluster has a pillar guide that covers the whole subject, and spokes that go deep on one part of it. Start with the pillar if the subject is new to you.

Technical SEO

9 guides

Whether a search engine can reach, render, index and understand your site. Everything else depends on this, which is why it is first.

Start here · pillar guide Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you Technical SEO is everything that determines whether a search engine can reach, render, understand and prefer your pages. It runs in a fixed order: crawl, render, index, understand, rank. A failure at any stage makes every stage after it irrelevant, which is why fixing content before fixing rendering wastes the content. 4 min read →

Core Web Vitals, and the order that actually reduces them A practical order for fixing LCP, INP and CLS, what each metric really measures, and why lab scores and field data disagree so often. 3 min read → JavaScript SEO: the difference between what you see and what gets indexed Client-side rendering, server rendering and static output compared for search — how to test what a crawler receives, and when a rewrite is the only fix. 3 min read → robots.txt in 2026, including every AI crawler worth naming What robots.txt controls and what it does not, the AI crawler user-agents that now matter, and the four mistakes that quietly remove sites from search. 3 min read → XML sitemaps: useful, misunderstood, and no substitute for links How to build a sitemap that helps — canonical URLs only, honest lastmod, sitemap index files, image sitemaps, and why a sitemap never rescues a bad site. 2 min read → Schema markup that does something, and the kind that risks a penalty Which schema types are worth shipping, how to link a graph with @id, the range errors validators miss, and the markup that risks a manual action. 3 min read → hreflang, and the honest answer that most sites do not need it How hreflang works, the three rules that make it valid, and the common case where the correct implementation is no hreflang at all. 2 min read → Migrating a site without losing what it took years to earn A sequenced checklist for changing domain, host or platform without losing rankings — redirect mapping, verification, and what to watch for 90 days after. 3 min read → Website accessibility, without the compliance theatre What accessibility means in practice, which failures cost you customers, and the tests that find the two-thirds of issues no automated scanner detects. 5 min read →

AI search

5 guides

Being findable by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and AI Overviews. The prerequisite most sites fail is not content — it is that their host silently refuses the crawlers.

Start here · pillar guide Generative Engine Optimization: being the source an AI answer quotes GEO is making your content retrievable, extractable and corroborated so answer engines cite you. It has three prerequisites in strict order: AI crawlers must be able to fetch you, the content must be in the HTML without JavaScript, and independent sources must corroborate that you exist. Fail the first and nothing else counts. 4 min read →

How to check whether AI crawlers can actually reach your site A copy-paste test for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Applebot access, what each status code means, and how to fix a 403 you did not configure. 3 min read → llms.txt: a fair assessment of a file nobody is obliged to read An honest look at llms.txt — what the proposal is, which crawlers obey it today, what to put in one, and why it is still worth twenty minutes. 2 min read → Answer Engine Optimization: writing the passage that gets quoted How to write passages that get lifted into featured snippets, People Also Ask and AI answers — the answer-first pattern, formats that extract, and what to avoid. 3 min read → Voice search optimization, minus the recycled advice Conversational queries, spoken answers and speakable markup — what genuinely helps for voice, and which widely repeated voice SEO advice is a myth. 3 min read →

E-commerce

8 guides

Planning, building and running a store that takes real payments — including the failure modes that only appear after launch.

Start here · pillar guide E-commerce website development: what the whole build actually involves An e-commerce build has six stages: scope and catalogue modelling, platform choice, front-end build, payment and tax integration, pre-launch QA, and indexation. Most failed builds skip stage one and discover the catalogue does not fit the platform in week four, when changing it costs the whole budget. 7 min read →

How much an e-commerce website actually costs, and what changes the number Real price bands for an online store, what moves the number up, and the five quote line items that hide the true cost until after you have signed. 4 min read → Stripe checkout integration, and the four failure modes nobody tests for How to integrate Stripe so orders survive a closed tab — webhooks over redirects, idempotency, 3D Secure, refunds, and the tests most builds skip. 3 min read → Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build: choosing without regretting it Which e-commerce platform fits your catalogue, your budget and your team — from a developer who builds two of the three and will tell you to use the third. 3 min read → The e-commerce SEO checklist, in the order the checks actually matter A working checklist for online stores — indexation, faceted navigation, product schema, out-of-stock handling, internal links and the traps that cause index bloat. 3 min read → Why checkouts get abandoned, and which fixes belong in the build Most abandoned carts are not a marketing problem. They are unexpected costs, forced accounts, broken mobile keyboards and a payment step that fails silently. 2 min read → E-commerce conversion: find the step that loses your orders Where online stores lose buyers — unexpected delivery cost, forced accounts, slow checkouts and missing trust signals — and how to find your own worst step. 4 min read → Product pages that answer objections in the order they arise What belongs on a product page and in what order — identification, suitability, total cost, timing and risk — plus the schema rules that keep you out of trouble. 4 min read →

Hiring

10 guides

What to ask before you spend money: scope, ownership, contracts, and which of the thirty-five named types of SEO actually apply to you.

Start here · pillar guide The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding Most "types of SEO" are not separate disciplines — they are the same fundamentals applied to a different context: a place, a business model, a content format or an engine. Three or four will apply to any given site. Buying all of them is how agencies bill for work that does nothing. 6 min read →

Hiring an offshore developer: the questions that protect you The contracting questions that protect you — data transfer legality, account ownership, escrow, IP assignment — asked from the other side of that deal. 4 min read → Local SEO when customers do not come to your address What actually moves local rankings for a business that travels to customers — profile completeness, NAP consistency, reviews, service-area pages done legitimately. 3 min read → Image SEO: findable images that do not wreck your page speed How images earn traffic and stop hurting performance — alt text that is not keyword stuffing, AVIF and WebP, responsive sizing, lazy loading and image sitemaps. 3 min read → Writing a website brief that gets you comparable quotes A brief template that produces comparable quotes instead of guesses — the ten sections that matter, and the three ambiguities that cause every scope dispute. 3 min read → Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today Domain, hosting, code, payment accounts, analytics and email — the ten assets to verify are in your name, and how to recover them if they are not. 3 min read → Buying a website: the questions that decide what you actually own The questions that decide whether you own a website or rent one — domain, code, hosting, content, and what happens when you want to leave. 5 min read → How to hire a web developer: measure the work, not the pitch Measure their delivered work instead of reading their portfolio. Three live URLs, PageSpeed Insights and view-source tell you more than any case study. 4 min read → How much does a website cost, and what drives the number? What actually moves the price of a website build, what is usually excluded from a quote, and the ongoing costs nobody mentions during the sale. 4 min read → Website maintenance: the routine that prevents silent failure The monthly and quarterly routine that keeps a site working — updates, backups that restore, monitoring, and the failures nobody notices until a customer says so. 4 min read →

Why these are free and ungated

Gating a guide behind an email form trades the thing that earns trust for a contact record that gets ignored. The guides are the sales argument: if reading one convinces you I know what I am doing, the enquiry follows on its own. If it does not, an email capture would not have helped.

They also exist for a second reason worth stating plainly. Informational content is the only realistic way a site with no authority earns links and citations, because nobody links to a services page. That is the entire off-page strategy here — no bought links, no private blog networks, no directory packages. The types of SEO guide explains why the alternatives are a bad trade.

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