Backlinks are still one of the strongest ranking signals Google uses. Despite every SEO declaring backlinks dead every year since 2016, Google’s own systems, every major third-party ranking study (Ahrefs, Semrush, Backlinko), and the SERPs themselves keep confirming the same thing: sites with more high-quality backlinks tend to rank better. This post covers what backlinks…
Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating hundreds or thousands of landing pages from a single template and a structured dataset, with each page targeting a specific keyword variation. Instead of writing one blog post for “best coffee shops in Brooklyn,” you build one template that auto-generates a page for every city in your dataset:…
SEO is the practice of earning free traffic from search engines by making your site easy to find, understand, and trust. In 2026 that still matters, but what “search” means has expanded. Google results share the page with AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search cites web pages in its answers, and Perplexity and Gemini pull from the…
Every website should have a sitemap. It’s the fastest way for search engines and AI crawlers to discover every page you want indexed, and it’s the first thing I check when analyzing a competitor’s site. This guide covers four ways to find any website’s XML sitemap, plus what to do once you have it. What…
Your URL slug is the part of a web address that identifies a specific page. On seothemes.net/slug/, the word “slug” is the slug. On a post URL like example.com/best-wordpress-themes/, everything after the domain is the slug. Slugs matter because they’re one of the small on-page signals Google uses to understand what a page is about.…
I’ve been designing and building WordPress sites for over a decade, and the stuff that actually separates new designers from experienced ones isn’t taste. It’s a handful of boring decisions they make consistently on every project: color, images, SEO basics, page weight, and what they do when a client gives feedback. Below are the seven…
Switching WordPress themes can affect your SEO rankings, but most of the time the damage is self-inflicted. I’ve swapped themes on sites pulling millions of pageviews a year, and when it goes wrong it’s because someone rushed the handoff, not because Google penalizes the switch itself. This guide covers what actually changes when you swap…
