SEO foundations: can search engines read and describe you?

Foundations, not rankings

SEO foundations decide whether search engines can find, read and correctly describe your pages. They do not guarantee rankings; actual rankings depend on competition and require ranking data to measure. Strong foundations make every other effort count.

What to check

• Search engines are allowed to crawl and index your pages (robots.txt and robots meta).
• Each page has a unique, descriptive title and meta description.
• One main heading per page, with a logical heading structure.
• A sitemap that lists your important pages.
• Canonical URLs, a declared language and descriptive image alt text.
• Content readable in the HTML, not only after JavaScript runs.

Critical issues come first

Some problems outweigh everything else. A homepage that tells search engines not to index it, or a robots.txt that blocks crawling, cancels the value of every other improvement. Fix these before polishing titles and descriptions.