Web Tutorials

Clear web development tutorials on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, performance, accessibility and SEO. Learn responsive layouts, modern tools and site optimization.

Multilingual SEO: What Twelve Languages Taught Us

Multilingual SEO is usually presented as a translation problem with some technical markup attached. Running this site in twelve languages, English, Arabic, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Vietnamese and both written forms of Chinese, has made it clear that the translation is the easy...

Content Refresh: When Updating Beats Publishing

A content refresh is the highest-return work available on most established sites, and it is unpopular because it produces nothing to announce. Updating a post that already ranks feels like maintenance. Publishing a new one feels like progress. The numbers usually disagree. The reason is that an existing page has...

Programmatic SEO: When It Works and When It Is Spam

Programmatic SEO means generating many pages from a template and a dataset, one per city, per product pair, per parameter combination. Done with a real dataset it is one of the most efficient things in the discipline. Done with a thesaurus and a spinner it is the thing search engines have spent two decades learning to...

Content Pruning: When Deleting Pages Raises Traffic

Content pruning is the least intuitive thing in search optimisation, because every instinct says more pages should mean more traffic. Publishing feels like accumulation. Deleting feels like throwing away work somebody paid for. The mechanism that makes removal helpful is competition between your own pages. When two of...