Checklist

SEO readiness checklist

Critical items come first: if any of them fail, fix them before anything else.

Critical

  • The homepage is not set to noindex.
  • robots.txt does not block search engines from important pages.
  • The main content is in the HTML.

Essentials

  • Unique, descriptive titles (about 10 to 70 characters).
  • Meta descriptions of about 50 to 180 characters.
  • One H1 per page and a logical heading structure.
  • A sitemap and canonical URLs.
  • A declared page language and image alt text.

Search intent

  • Titles and headlines use the words people search for your category.
  • Internal links connect related pages.