Great content will not rank if search engines cannot crawl and understand your website. Run through this checklist before and after every launch.
Crawling and indexing
- Submit an XML sitemap containing only canonical, indexable pages.
- Check that robots.txt does not block important sections.
- Remove any leftover "noindex" tags from staging.
- Set up Google Search Console and verify the domain.
URLs and structure
- Use short, readable URLs with hyphens.
- Add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content.
- Redirect old URLs with 301 redirects when replacing a site.
On-page essentials
- Unique title tags and meta descriptions for every page.
- One clear H1 per page with a logical heading hierarchy.
- Descriptive alt text on meaningful images.
Performance
- Compress and lazy-load images.
- Enable browser caching and compression.
- Keep JavaScript lean and defer non-critical scripts.
Structured data
Add schema markup for your organisation, breadcrumbs, articles, services and FAQs. It helps search engines understand your content and can unlock rich results.
Security and mobile
Serve everything over HTTPS and make sure every page is fully usable on mobile screens. Both are baseline expectations for modern search engines.
