Technical SEO is the groundwork that lets search engines and AI crawlers find, understand, and trust your pages. Here is a practical checklist, grouped by area, with what to check and how to fix it. You can check most of these automatically with a free Crawlyze audit.
Crawlability and indexing
- robots.txt should allow the pages you want indexed (and the AI crawlers you want to appear in). Fix: remove overly broad Disallow rules.
- XML sitemap should list your important URLs and be submitted in Search Console. Fix: generate one and reference it in robots.txt.
- Canonical tags should point each page at its preferred URL to avoid splitting duplicate signals. Fix: add a self-referencing canonical.
- noindex should sit only on pages you genuinely want out of search. Fix: check for accidental noindex on important pages.
On-page
- Title tags: unique, about 50-60 characters, keyword near the front. See how to write title tags and meta descriptions.
- Meta descriptions: unique, 70-160 characters, written to earn the click.
- One H1 per page that states the topic, with a logical H2/H3 structure below it.
- Structured data (Organization, Article, FAQPage) for rich results and AI extraction.
Performance
- Page weight and images: compress and serve modern formats (WebP or AVIF), and resize to display size.
- Core Web Vitals: watch loading, interactivity, and layout shift.
- Render-blocking scripts: defer non-critical JavaScript.
Foundations
- HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed content.
- Mobile-friendly: a responsive viewport and readable tap targets.
- Server-rendered content so crawlers (including AI) see your text without running JavaScript.
Work top to bottom: crawlability first (if pages cannot be found or indexed, nothing else matters), then on-page, then performance and foundations. Not sure where you stand? A free audit grades all of this in seconds.
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