Below is a basic checklist of technical items to complete before launching a SEO optimized website or page.
Basic Setup:
- Analytics must be installed
- Google Search Console must be setup and configured
- Site Crawling should be enabled – On-Demand and Automated
Crawling and Indexing:
- URL’s must be indexed
- Important content should always be indexed
- Return 200 status code. The HTTP 200 OK success status response code indicates that the request has succeeded
- Indexable by robot meta tags
- URL not to be blocked by robot.txt file
- URL’s must be listed in XML sitemap
- Sitemap file location must be defined in the robot.txt file
- Sitemap file must be submitted to the search engines
- URL should not be discoverable by internal links or navigation
- Contents must be available in a single URL
- Google-selected canonical matches User-selected canonical
- No canonical/indexation mixed-signal errors
- Friendly URL structure
- Content can be rendered using basic JavaScript
Meta and Structured Data:
- Page should contain a Title element
- Title contains important keywords in the first 60 characters
- Title tag must be unique
- It should contain unique meta description
- Favicon should be defined
- Open Graph (Open Graph meta tags are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media) and social metadata
- Structured markups
- Uses max-image-preview: large setting
Content:
- Duplicate content should be avoided
- Content is organized with hierarchical HTML tags
- Content is keyword-targeted
- Content doesn’t violate Google’s Quality Guidelines (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/overview)
- Avoids intrusive interstitials
- Avoid heavy ads above the fold
- Content isn’t loaded in an iFrame
- Content isn’t loaded in Flash
- Lazy-loaded content is visible in the ViewPort
- Support paginated loading for infinite scroll
- Current published and updated dates
- Clear who the author and/or publisher is
- Make sure content doesn’t trigger Google Safe search filters
Links and Navigation:
- Links are crawlable
- Links don’t link to broken pages (Error code: 404)
- Links use descriptive anchor text
- Links are qualified when appropriate (nofollow, UGC, sponsored)
- Faceted navigation doesn’t lead to duplicate content
- Paginated pages are clearly linked
- Page does not contain excessive amount of links
- Page does not link to redirect chains
Images:
- Images contain descriptive alt attributes
- Image heights and widths are defined
- Use descriptive titles, captions, filenames and text for images
- Images doesn’t contain important text
- Images are listed in image sitemaps
Mobile Friendly:
- Passes Google’s mobile friendly test (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly)
- Preference to responsive web design
- Mobile content and links match desktop site
- Special considerations for separate URL’s
Speed:
- Content fully loads within a reasonable time
- URL passes Google Core Web Vitals assessment (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-user-experience-report/)
Backlinks:
- URL has relevant backlinks
- Backlinks don’t violate Google guidelines (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes)
- Disavow file doesn’t block important links