SEO articles: indexing, titles and structure
Indexing, titles, structure, links and what all of it costs. Each article answers one question and rests on a primary source.
What SEO work is made of
Search optimization splits into three questions: whether Google can crawl the page, whether it decides to index it, and whether the page answers what the person was looking for. The first two have exact technical answers, the third is settled by content.
The second one is where most sites stall. The page is crawled, listed in the sitemap, free of errors, and Search Console still says “Crawled - currently not indexed”. That is Google's verdict on value. Tidying headings does not change it; content that is not on the page yet does.
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Which free SEO tools exist and what does each one actually show?
Several free SEO tools exist and they answer different questions. Search Console shows what Google knows about you. PageSpeed measures speed. Lighthouse audits one page. Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs. Rich Results Test validates schema. None of them answers every question.
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How do internal links work and how do you lay them out properly?
Internal links are links between your own pages. They do three things: show a crawler the route to a page, pass along a share of the site's authority, and describe what the target page is about through the link text. A page with no incoming internal links often goes unindexed entirely.
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What is E-E-A-T and how do you show experience and authorship on a page?
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, taken from Google's quality rater guidelines. It is not an algorithm signal but a set of criteria the algorithm tries to approximate. In practice it comes down to four visible things: an author, a date, sources, and facts nobody could write without having done the work.
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How much do SEO services cost and what are you actually paying for?
Ongoing SEO work typically costs between 300 and 2000 euros a month, and a one-off technical audit between 300 and 1500. The difference is driven by scope and competition in your niche, not by the quality of the provider. A fixed price quoted without looking at your site is the first sign scope was never discussed.
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Which structured data is actually used, and where does it go wrong?
In practice we see two extremes: either no structured data at all, or a template Organization node and nothing else. The mistakes are consistent too — data that does not match what the page shows, Article without an author or dates, Product without a price or availability, and FAQPage on a page that has no FAQ.
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What are sitemap.xml and robots.txt for and how do you set them up correctly?
robots.txt tells crawlers which parts of a site not to fetch, while sitemap.xml lists the URLs worth reading along with the date each last changed. Neither forces Google to index anything, but a mistake in either one can shut an entire website out of search.
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What state is SEO in across ordinary websites?
Across roughly 500 audits the same pattern repeats: a site with a strong link profile sits at about 60 out of 100 technically — roughly what it had on its first day. Links and articles raise authority but never touch indexing, speed, structured data or internal links.
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Which side is losing you more right now?
There is nothing to choose — only the question of which side loses you more. Across roughly 500 audits SEO and GEO stand on the same foundation: indexing, speed, structure. What differs is the top layer, and bought links raise only the SEO half.
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Why did my organic traffic from Google drop and how do I find the cause?
Organic traffic drops have four distinct causes, and the shape of the fall separates them. An overnight collapse means a technical fault or a manual action. A gradual slide over weeks means an algorithm update or a competitor. One page falling alone means a problem with that page. Rankings holding while clicks fall means zero-click search.
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Which Schema.org structured data types does a website actually need?
Structured data is a JSON-LD block that repeats your page content in a form machines can read. In practice you need four types: Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList and a page type — Article, Product, Service or FAQPage. The remaining Schema.org types do nothing for most sites.
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Why are two of my pages competing with each other?
Cannibalization is when several of your pages answer the same question. Google cannot show both, so it picks one — often not the one you would choose — and the position starts swinging between them. The fix is almost always merging, not optimising.
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Why doesn't Google index my pages?
The usual reason is neither a penalty nor an algorithm secret. The page is either technically unreachable for Googlebot, or it asks not to be indexed (`noindex`, a `canonical` pointing elsewhere), or Google found it, read it and decided it adds nothing new to what the index already holds.
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How do I write a clear title and meta description?
Write a unique title that identifies the page's purpose and a meta description explaining what the visitor will get. Keep both consistent with the H1 and visible content. Search engines choose their own result titles and snippets, so displaying your exact wording is not guaranteed.
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What do I do about "Discovered – currently not indexed"?
It means Google knows your URL but has not once come to read it. This is not an error or a penalty but a decision about importance: the site has many URLs and this one does not look worth the queue. Internal links and fewer junk URLs are what help.
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How do I set up two languages and hreflang correctly?
Each language needs its own stable URL, and both versions must point at each other. Google only accepts an `hreflang` group when it is reciprocal: if A points to B but B does not point back, the whole declaration is ignored and the two languages start competing with each other.
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Why is an SEO audit in the local language more useful?
The difference is measurement, not translation. Lithuanian text written without diacritics, hreflang pairs between the Lithuanian and English versions, and local search competition are things an English-first tool either does not check or scores incorrectly.
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When is an automated SEO audit better than a manual one?
Automation wins where a check is a rule and repeats: indexing, titles, links, speed, schema. A person wins where judgement is needed — about topics, copy and priorities. The worst option is doing by hand what a machine does more accurately.
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What does a technical SEO audit actually cover?
A technical audit checks whether a search engine can reach the page, read it, understand it and show it. Four layers run in strict order: server response, indexing rules, rendering with JavaScript, and only then titles, schema and internal link structure.
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What does a free SEO scan show, and what does it miss?
A free scan answers the technical question: is the page reachable, is it understandable to search and to AI, and is anything stopping it from being shown. What it does not answer is whether the topic is worth writing about at all, and whether your offer beats the one next door.
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Where do you start when fixing a site's SEO?
Start with indexing, not keywords. If Google does not have the page, nothing else has anywhere to work. The order is: are the pages indexed, do the titles tell pages apart, does the content answer the question, is speed getting in the way, and only then — are the numbers moving.
Other areas
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GEO and AI
GEO, AEO and AI SEO are one body of work measured by three questions. Here is what each means and what to actually change on the page.
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Speed
Core Web Vitals, the PageSpeed score and what they actually measure. A number without an address changes nothing, so we talk about specific files.
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Security
Certificates, security headers and what a site says about itself for no reason. We demand only what matters to an ordinary website.
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Benchmarks
A score means nothing without a comparison. Here is what ordinary looks like, what good looks like, and what separates them.