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Method SEO

Method SEO is an approach to building sites to maximize organic visibility and high-intent referral traffic from both conventional search and AI-powered answer engines.

Contents

The Method SEO guide has five parts with over forty planned topics. It’s actively written and updated, with new parts and topics added regularly.

Part 1: Structure

  1. Site purpose
  2. Visual sitemap
  3. Navigation
  4. Semantic HTML

Part 2: Performance

  1. CSS
  2. JavaScript
  3. Image optimization
  4. Preload Scanner
  5. Core Web Vitals
  6. Serving

Part 3: Content

  1. Content Flow
  2. Content Patterns
  3. Entity/Embedding
  4. Engagement
  5. Topical Relevance
  6. Intent words
  7. Linking
  8. Case-sensitive URLs
  9. Trust signals
  10. Localization / Geo signals
  11. Duplicate content
  12. Freshness
  13. Multimedia
  14. Schema Markup
  15. Cleanup
  16. Red flags
  17. Benign cloaking

Part 4: Discovery

  1. Crawling
  2. Link Submission
  3. Newsletters
  4. Robots Exclusion
  5. Robots Meta Tag
  6. RSS Feeds
  7. Sitemaps (XML/HTML)
  8. Social Media
  9. Server responses

Part 5: Monitoring

  1. Web analytics
  2. Little Warden
  3. Ahrefs
  4. Pingdom
  5. Alerts
  6. Google Search Console
  7. Reporting
  8. Testing

About Method SEO

The Method SEO guide is the culmination of over three decades of Jon Henshaw optimizing sites – from tiny blogs to multi-million-page enterprise sites – and conducting countless tests and experiments to determine the most reliable methods to get pages to rank.

The guide is written to be accessible to non-technical readers, people new to SEO, product managers, and software developers.

For brevity and accessibility, every chapter provides a concise definition and reason for its importance, followed by how-to instructions and helpful tips. It ends with a list of in-depth resources readers can use for further study or to share with a web developer.

Experienced SEOs will likely be familiar with many concepts in this guide. My goal for SEOs is to fill knowledge gaps and revisit old and new methods. My goal for every reader is to provide a complete turnkey SEO solution that doesn’t require off-site tactics to rank well in search engines.