Free SEO guide
Learn SEO the way you would audit it
Short, practical guides that move from a first crawl to AI visibility. Each one ends at a DigestSEO tool you can run yourself, so you finish with evidence rather than advice.
The guides
Read them in order for a full pass, or open the one that matches the problem in front of you.
Foundations
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How search engines work
How a page travels from crawl to index to result, where AI answers fit, and which of the three stages a given problem actually belongs to.
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SEO myths worth dropping
Tactics search engines have said outright do nothing: meta keywords, word-count targets, duplicate-content penalties, and the new crop that arrived with AI.
Technical
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Why pages don't get indexed
The difference between a technical block and a quality judgement, what each Search Console status means, and how to check which one applies to your page.
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Robots.txt and sitemaps
Why a disallowed URL can still be indexed, why a sitemap guarantees nothing, and which sitemap tags Google reads, ignores, or distrusts.
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Core Web Vitals
The three Core Web Vitals, their thresholds and 75th-percentile assessment, how field data differs from lab diagnostics, and how they fit into page experience.
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Structured data
Why schema markup buys eligibility rather than ranking, why JSON-LD is the format to use, and why markup has to match what the page shows.
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Hreflang
The return-link rule, self-referencing annotations, valid language and region codes, and what x-default is actually for.
Content and on-page
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Title tags and meta descriptions
How Google uses title elements and meta descriptions, why there is no fixed character limit, and why Search may rewrite title links and snippets.
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Search intent
How to read intent from the results themselves, the four kinds behind most queries, and why one page serving two intents usually serves neither.
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Internal linking
Why most new pages are discovered through links, what anchor text communicates, and how click depth changes the way a page is treated.
AI search
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Generative engine optimization (GEO)
How assistants pick the sources they cite, what makes a page quotable in a generated answer, and how to measure citations without treating one run as a ranking.
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How AI search works
How Google's AI Search uses query fan-out, which SEO foundations still apply, and why no special AI file or markup is required.
Tools behind the guides
Free, no account required.
Questions and answers
Is this guide free?
Yes. Every guide points at a DigestSEO tool you can run without an account, and nothing on this page is gated.
Do I need to read it in order?
No. Each guide stands on its own — start with the crawl if you are new, or jump to the one that matches the problem in front of you.
Does following this guarantee rankings?
No. Clear technical evidence and useful content can support better decisions; they do not guarantee rankings, citations, or inclusion in AI answers.
Start with your own site
Run a bounded audit on one URL and read the findings against the guide that matches them.
Run a free audit