Technical SEO Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Hit Publish

Most technical SEO problems aren't dramatic — they're small, boring oversights that quietly cap how well a page can perform. Here's a practical list to run through before you hit publish, grouped by what they actually affect.

Can search engines find and index it?

1. It's not blocked in robots.txt. Check the site's robots.txt file for a Disallow rule that accidentally matches the new page's path.
2. There's no accidental noindex tag. View the page source and search for noindex — in both the meta robots tag and, less obviously, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
3. It's in your sitemap. New pages should be added to the sitemap so search engines have a direct, explicit path to discover them — not left to be found only by accident.
4. The canonical tag points to itself (or, if it's a deliberate duplicate of another page, to the correct authoritative URL) — not to something that 404s or redirects elsewhere.

Does the page describe itself correctly?

5. A title tag exists, is roughly 15-60 characters, and actually describes the page — not a generic template default.
6. A meta description exists, under 160 characters, written to earn a click rather than just restating the title.
7. Exactly one H1 heading, describing the page's main topic.
8. Every meaningful image has alt text — what it shows, not the filename.

Is it technically sound?

9. Served over HTTPS, with no mixed content (images or scripts still loading over plain HTTP on an otherwise secure page).
10. Has a viewport meta tag, so it actually displays correctly on a phone instead of requiring pinch-to-zoom.
11. No broken links on the page — internal or external. A single dead link is a small thing; a page full of them signals neglect to both users and search engines.
12. Structured data validates, if you're using any — a JSON-LD block with a typo in it doesn't earn a rich result, it just silently fails.

Is the content itself solid?

13. No duplicate content — matching titles, matching meta descriptions, or body text that's a near-copy of another page on the site.
14. Genuinely substantial content — as a rough floor, under 300 words is usually a sign there isn't enough here to rank for anything competitive.

Will anyone — or anything — actually find it?

15. It's linked from somewhere else on your site. A page with zero internal links pointing to it is an orphan: search engines and visitors alike can only reach it by accident. Link to it from your navigation, a related-content section, or another page's body text.

Doing this by hand doesn't scale

Checking all 15 of these manually for one page is reasonable. Checking them across a hundred pages is not — which is the entire reason a crawler is worth having: point it at your site, and it checks every item on this list, on every page, in one pass.