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Notes on WordPress SEO and AI search

Long-form guides from the team building Rankwyn, covering the technical and structural side of getting found by search engines and AI systems alike.

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The pillar guides

AI search and GEOPillar guide

Generative Engine Optimization for WordPress: The Complete Guide

Most GEO guides are platform-agnostic theory. This one is not. It covers exactly what to build on a WordPress site, llms.txt files, robots.txt bot rules, answer-first content structure, and schema, to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.

27 min read

AI search and GEOPillar guide

Who Is Actually Reading Your Site: A Guide to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot Traffic on WordPress

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are already crawling your WordPress site, whether you have noticed or not. Here is how to identify them in your logs, tell healthy activity from a problem, and decide what to allow, throttle, or block.

27 min read

Content and discoveryPillar guide

The Complete Guide to Schema Markup for WordPress

Schema markup used to be a rich-results tactic. Now it also decides whether AI engines can understand and cite your content at all. Here is every schema type that matters for WordPress, real JSON-LD examples for each, and how to implement them regardless of which editor you use.

27 min read

Growth and reachPillar guide

Multi-Location Local SEO for WordPress: The Complete Playbook

Most multi-location SEO guides cover NAP consistency and reviews and stop there. This playbook also covers the WordPress build decisions: custom post type vs hand-built pages, schema per location, and sitemap strategy once you have dozens of branches.

27 min read

Growth and reachPillar guide

WooCommerce SEO: The Complete Guide to Product Schema, GTIN, and Rankings

Product pages either show up in search with a price, a rating, and stock status, or they show up as a plain blue link. This guide covers the parts of WooCommerce SEO that actually decide which one happens: schema anatomy, identifiers, variable product offers, category structure, and the Core Web Vitals problems specific to product-heavy sites.

27 min read

More guides

Practical, focused how-to guides

Content and discovery

Best Free WordPress SEO Plugins in 2026

Free WordPress SEO plugins do not all give you the same thing. Here is what Rankwyn, Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, and two lightweight alternatives actually include in their free tiers, and how to pick between them.

8 min read

Content and discovery

The Complete WordPress SEO Checklist for 2026

A practical, skimmable checklist for auditing WordPress SEO in 2026, covering content and metadata, technical foundation, structured data, site health, and measurement.

9 min read

Content and discovery

How to Do SEO on WordPress: A Beginner's Guide

Never done SEO on WordPress before? This guide walks through the first five things to set up, how to write a page title that actually gets clicked, and the mistakes that trip up almost every beginner.

10 min read

Content and discovery

Technical SEO for WordPress: A Practical Guide

Content SEO gets the attention, but technical SEO decides whether Google can find, render, and trust your pages in the first place. Here is what actually matters on WordPress.

9 min read

Comparisons

Yoast SEO vs Rank Math: Which Should You Use in 2026?

Yoast SEO and Rank Math are the two most widely installed WordPress SEO plugins, and both do the job well. Here is how their free tiers, pricing, and interfaces actually differ, without the sales pitch.

10 min read

Comparisons

8 Best Yoast SEO Alternatives in 2026, Compared

Yoast SEO is not the only serious option for WordPress anymore. Here is an honest, feature by feature look at eight alternatives, who each one is actually built for, and how to pick without guessing.

12 min read

Site health and control

How to Switch WordPress SEO Plugins Without Losing Rankings

Switching SEO plugins feels riskier than it is, and the risk that does exist comes from two specific, avoidable causes. Here is the process for changing plugins without losing the rankings you already have.

9 min read

Content and discovery

How to Validate and Test Schema Markup on WordPress

Adding schema markup is only half the job. Here's how to actually confirm it's valid, what breaks silently if you skip validation, and which tools to use.

7 min read

Content and discovery

How to Create and Submit an XML Sitemap in WordPress

Every WordPress site needs an accurate XML sitemap that search engines can find and trust. Here is how to generate one, verify it, and submit it correctly, plus when to add video or news sitemaps.

9 min read

Site health and control

Why Google Isn't Indexing Your WordPress Site (and How to Fix It)

If your WordPress pages aren't showing up in Google, work through this in order: the search engine visibility setting, stray noindex tags, robots.txt, sitemap submission, and what Search Console's coverage statuses actually mean.

10 min read

Content and discovery

The Complete Guide to robots.txt for WordPress

robots.txt is one of the smallest files on your site and one of the easiest to get wrong. Here is what it actually controls, a real WordPress example, and the mistakes that quietly take a whole site out of search.

11 min read

Site health and control

How to Set Up 301 Redirects in WordPress Without Breaking SEO

A redirect is a small technical decision with an outsized effect on rankings if you get it wrong. Here is how to choose the right status code, set it up in WordPress, and catch the gaps you missed.

9 min read

Site health and control

How to Find and Fix Broken Links on WordPress

Broken links accumulate quietly on every WordPress site. Here is how to find them, decide whether to unlink, redirect, or update each one, and run a scanner safely.

9 min read

Growth and reach

Local SEO for WordPress: The Beginner's Guide

If you run one location, local SEO does not need to be complicated. Here is the short list of things that actually matter, in the order to do them.

9 min read

Growth and reach

WooCommerce SEO Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Launch

Most WooCommerce launch checklists cover payment gateways and shipping zones and stop there. This one covers the 15 SEO checks worth running before you flip a store live, or before your next audit, grouped by what actually breaks if you skip each one.

13 min read

AI and answer engines

GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What's the Difference?

SEO, AEO, and GEO get used interchangeably online, and that is wrong. Here is a plain-English breakdown of what each term actually means, how they differ, and which one you should worry about first.

8 min read

AI and answer engines

How to Get Your Website Cited by ChatGPT

ChatGPT does not cite pages at random. It picks from a shortlist of sources it can actually fetch, parse, and trust, then lifts the parts that answer the question cleanly. Here is how to put your WordPress content on that shortlist.

12 min read

AI and answer engines

How to Optimize for Google AI Overviews

Google has been direct about this one: there is no separate playbook for AI Overviews. Here is what its own documentation says to do, and what it says to stop doing.

9 min read

Growth and reach

Hreflang for WordPress: A Practical Guide

Hreflang tells search engines which language and region version of a page to show a given searcher. Get the syntax wrong, skip a reciprocal link, or point it at a redirect, and the whole mechanism quietly stops working.

10 min read

Growth and reach

SEO for Page Builders: Elementor, Divi, and Beyond

Page builders change how WordPress renders a page, and that changes what SEO work actually looks like. Here is what to check in Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, and Breakdance.

10 min read

Site health and control

WordPress SEO at Scale: Multisite, Roles, and WP-CLI for Agencies

Managing SEO on one WordPress site is a checklist. Managing it on forty client sites is an operations problem. Here is how agencies use multisite architecture, role based access, and WP-CLI to keep it under control.

9 min read

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