SEO Tools

Standard XML sitemaps only cover pages — image and video sitemaps feed Google Images and Google Video with specific metadata. Here's the full XML structure for both types, when they provide the most value, the licence property for photographers, and how to organise them with a sitemap index.

XML sitemaps have priority and changefreq fields that look like crawl-prioritization controls — and Google has stated it largely ignores both, relying instead on observed crawl/change patterns. Here's why self-reported metadata loses value when it doesn't reflect reality, why lastmod is the one field worth getting right (if it's genuinely accurate), and where sitemap effort actually matters.

Raw keyword density is an outdated metric. TF-IDF is more useful. Neither is as important as comprehensive topical coverage with natural language. Here's how search engines actually measure relevance and what keyword density tools are actually good for.

Heading extraction is more valuable as a competitive research tool than for auditing your own pages. Here's how to build a content brief from competitor heading patterns, identify coverage gaps, and structure headings for featured snippet opportunities.

Learn how hreflang tags work, the strict bidirectionality rules, language and region code formats, and how to use a free hreflang generator to target the right content to the right international audience.

Canonical tags and 301 redirects both solve duplicate content problems — but through different mechanisms with different trade-offs. Here's the decision framework for when to use each, common canonical mistakes, and the belt-and-braces approach for domain canonicalisation.

A link extractor showing 200 links tells you they exist — not whether 30 of them now lead nowhere. Link rot accumulates silently because broken outbound links produce no visible error on the page containing them, and external sites break links for reasons entirely outside your control. Here's why this requires recurring (not one-time) checks, the different fix approaches depending on why a link broke, and the particularly tricky case of links that "work" but now redirect to unrelated content.

News sitemaps use a different XML namespace with required fields (news:publication, news:publication_date, news:title) and a 48-hour recency rule — Google's News crawler processes them separately from standard Googlebot indexing. Here's the exact XML structure, why the 48-hour limit exists, how Google News inclusion differs from organic indexing (different system, different requirements), and what happened to the AMP requirement for Top Stories after June 2021.

Core Web Vitals matter less for rankings than expected — but improving them still makes sites faster and better for users. Here's what LCP, INP, and CLS actually measure, what causes failures in each, and how to prioritise improvements.

The viewport meta tag is a rendering instruction, not an SEO tag — but its absence causes mobile browsers to render pages in 980px desktop mode, directly affecting Google's mobile-first indexing quality assessment. Here's what width=device-width and initial-scale=1 actually do (and why user-scalable=no is an accessibility violation), how preconnect hints reduce Google Font load times by 100-300ms, and why HTTP header versions of CSP are more secure than meta http-equiv versions.