The Technical SEO Checklist: The First 12 Steps on a New Site

Technical SEO doesn't replace your content; it makes sure your content gets read. If a page isn't being indexed properly, how well it was written changes nothing. The list below is the set of ordinary but non-negotiable checks we run before taking a site live.

1. Every page has exactly one self-referencing canonical. 2. One URL, one language, one response — no redirecting on a cookie, browser language or location; because bots carry no cookies, a redirect like that can make your homepage unindexable. 3. The correct page language attribute in the HTML that comes from the server. 4. Exactly one h1 per page, with a sensible h2/h3 hierarchy beneath it.

5. Title tags around 60 characters, descriptions around 155, and different on every page. 6. An address that doesn't exist returns a 404 — not a 200 with an empty page; soft 404s are the quietest way to burn crawl budget. 7. The sitemap contains only URLs that return 200 and that you want indexed; no redirects, no noindex. 8. robots.txt genuinely knows what it's blocking.

9. The structured data tells the truth: Organization, BreadcrumbList, BlogPosting on blog articles, and a machine-readable publication date. There's a trap we see a lot here — writing the date only in human language ("August 12, 2026") and making the code parse that string. The parse fails, and the date silently disappears. 10. Every page has a social sharing image, not just the homepage.

11. Core Web Vitals measured on a real device: the size and loading priority of the largest content element are deliberate, no fonts, images or ads cause layout shift, and the main JavaScript bundle isn't carrying code that page has no use for. 12. Every page you want indexed has at least one internal link pointing at it — a page that's in the sitemap and linked from nowhere is an orphan.

None of this list is a single day's work; but none of it is a "we'll look at it later" job either. Setting it up correctly from the start on a new project is both faster and cheaper than fixing it six months on. For a site that's already live, the first step isn't guessing, it's measuring: the search console coverage report, a real performance measurement, and a look at the HTML that comes off the server.