Optimize your site
Site optimization, explained without the mysticism
Most SEO problems aren't exotic. They're broken links, bad titles, thin pages, and slow loads — findable, fixable, and boring in the best way. This guide covers the whole stack honestly, layer by layer, whether or not you ever use our tool.
The five layers, in the order to fix them
1 · Technical foundation
Can search engines reach, crawl, and index your pages at all? Redirect chains, HTTPS and mixed content, canonical tags, robots directives, sitemap accuracy, site depth, and broken links live here. Nothing above this layer matters if this layer is broken.
broken links · redirects · canonicals · robots & noindex · sitemap · URL structure · architecture depth
2 · On-page elements
The signals each page sends about itself: the title tag, the meta description, one clear H1 with a sane heading hierarchy, descriptive image alt text, and internal links whose anchor text says where they go.
title tags · meta descriptions · headings · alt text · internal linking
3 · Content health
Whether the page deserves to rank: enough substance to be useful (thin content), no near-duplicates competing with each other, dates and references that aren't stale, and the trust pages (about, contact, privacy) that make a site look run by humans.
thin content · duplicate content · freshness · E-E-A-T trust signals
4 · Structured data
Machine-readable JSON-LD that tells search engines what a page is — article, product, FAQ, organization — and unlocks richer result displays. Easy to get subtly wrong; validation matters more than volume.
JSON-LD presence & validity per page type
5 · Performance & mobile
How the page feels to load: Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), and whether the mobile experience — viewport, font sizes, tap targets — actually works. Google measures this on real users; so should you.
Core Web Vitals · mobile usability
The order matters: a perfect title on an unindexable page is a poem nobody reads. Work top to bottom, and re-check after every round of fixes — PicoRank runs all of this automatically on every crawl, 26 checks across the five layers, and keeps each run so you can watch the list shrink.
Deep dives, one problem at a time
Each guide teaches one check area properly: why it matters, what good looks like, and how to fix it at scale. More guides land here as we write them.
Title tags
The 60 characters that decide your click-through rate — how to write and size them.
Read the title tags guide →
Meta descriptions
They don't affect rankings directly — they affect whether humans click. Write them like ads.
Read the meta descriptions guide →
Image alt text
What alt text is really for, whether it matters for SEO, and how to fix a site full of missing alts.
Read the image alt text guide →
Broken links
Why 404s quietly leak authority and trust, how to find every broken link, and what to do with each.
Read the broken links guide →
Internal linking
The cheapest SEO lever most sites underuse: hubs and spokes, descriptive anchors, and rescuing orphan pages.
Read the internal linking guide →
Prefer definitions to guides? SEO terms are in the plain-English SEO glossary; timely notes and experiments live on the PicoRank rank-tracking blog.
Audit your site free — all 26 checks
Add your domain, run a crawl, get a prioritized fix list. Included in the free plan, along with the rank tracking to prove the fixes worked.