Technical SEO: what's your checklist?

Question

I'm especially curious to hear from the folks building their own sites from scratch, using static site generators, etc. What meta tags are must-haves for you? How do you approach the title & description? Are there any platforms that need special treatment, or have quirks?

This came up today because I noticed that LinkedIn needs your "og:image" meta tag to also have a "name" property set to "image"—TIL!

Violetta Chernobuk · Accepted Answer

Here’s a technical SEO checklist to help optimize your website for search engines:

Crawlability and Indexing:

Ensure robots.txt is properly configured to allow search engine crawlers access.
Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console to ensure all important pages are indexed.
Check for any noindex tags on important pages and remove them if necessary.
Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.

Site Speed Optimization:

Optimize image sizes and use modern formats (e.g., WebP).
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
Enable browser caching and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster content delivery.
Use lazy loading for images and videos to improve load times.

Mobile-Friendliness:

Ensure your website is responsive and functions well on all device sizes.
Test your site’s mobile performance with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and make adjustments as needed.
Pay attention to font size, button placement, and touch target spacing on mobile.

Secure Connection (HTTPS):

Use an SSL certificate to ensure your website is secure and accessible via HTTPS.
Redirect HTTP pages to HTTPS to avoid mixed content issues.

On-Page Optimization:

Use unique and descriptive title tags with relevant keywords for each page.
Write compelling meta descriptions to improve click-through rates.
Use header tags (H1, H2, etc.) for better content structure and readability.
Optimize image alt tags for accessibility and SEO.

Structured Data Markup:

Implement schema markup (e.g., for products, reviews, FAQs) to help search engines understand your content better and enhance rich results.
Validate structured data with Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure accuracy.

URL Structure:

Use short, descriptive URLs with keywords that reflect page content.
Avoid special characters and unnecessary parameters in URLs.

Internal Linking:

Build a strong internal linking structure to help users and search engines navigate the site.
Link to high-priority pages from multiple areas to improve their ranking potential.

Core Web Vitals:

Optimize for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) as these impact page experience.
Monitor Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console for ongoing performance.

404 Errors and Redirects:

Fix any broken links or 404 errors to improve user experience.
Set up 301 redirects for outdated or removed pages to preserve SEO value.

Monitoring and Maintenance:
Regularly audit the website with tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to catch issues early.
Set up Google Analytics to track user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Monitor for crawl errors, index coverage issues, and any site penalties.

bijuan_xie · Answer

Hope this will do help to you

bijuan_xie · Answer

take this article for example: https://www.dvdfab.cn/resource/d... Before releasing this article, we will customize the meta description and summary to put more key words( but do not put so frequent, make it more natural); and we also customize the alt of each picture, which is more likely to be caught by google. Besides, we need to search backlinks to improve the traffic of our articles.

Technical SEO: what's your checklist?

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