Technical SEO Checklist — Meta Tags, Robots, Hreflang & Structured Data

Meta tags: title, description and robots

Every indexable page needs a unique <title> (50–60 characters) and meta description (140–160 characters). The title is a confirmed ranking factor; the description influences click-through rate.

The robots meta tag controls crawling and indexing per page: noindex prevents indexing; nofollow prevents link equity passing. Use the meta tag generator to produce a complete set including Open Graph and Twitter Card tags.

Common mistakes: duplicate titles across pages, missing descriptions, accidentally noindexing important pages via CMS settings.

Canonical URLs

A rel="canonical" tag tells search engines which version of a page is the "master" when content is accessible via multiple URLs (with/without www, HTTP/HTTPS, query parameters, pagination). Every page should self-reference its own canonical unless it is a deliberate duplicate.

Canonicals should be absolute URLs (https://example.com/page, not /page) and should point to 200-status pages. Chains of canonicals (A → B → C) are unreliable — always point directly to the final canonical.

Robots.txt: crawl budget management

robots.txt lives at the domain root and controls which paths crawlers may access. It does not prevent indexing — only crawling. Key rules:

• Block low-value pages (search results, filter combinations, admin paths) to preserve crawl budget
• Never block CSS or JS files — Google needs them to render pages
• Include a Sitemap: directive pointing to your XML sitemap
• Consider blocking AI training bots (GPTBot, CCBot) if you do not want content scraped

Use the robots.txt generator to build rules with presets for WordPress, e-commerce and custom sites.

XML sitemaps

An XML sitemap tells search engines which pages exist and when they last changed. Best practices:

• Include only canonical, indexable (200 status, no noindex) pages
• Keep each sitemap under 50,000 URLs; use a sitemap index for larger sites
• Set lastmod to the actual content change date — not the current date on every page
• Submit via Google Search Console and reference in robots.txt
• Do not include pages you block in robots.txt

Hreflang for multilingual sites

If your site serves content in multiple languages or targets multiple regions, hreflang annotations help Google serve the right version to the right user. Key rules:

• Every page must reference all its language alternates including itself
• Annotations must be reciprocal (if page A points to page B, page B must point back to page A)
• Use valid ISO 639-1 language codes and optional ISO 3166-1 region codes: en-GB, de, pt-BR
• Set an x-default for the fallback/language-selector page
• Choose one implementation: HTML link tags, HTTP headers (for PDFs) or sitemap entries

The hreflang generator validates codes and produces either HTML or sitemap XML output.

Structured data (JSON-LD)

Structured data (schema.org markup) helps search engines understand page content and can trigger rich results: FAQ accordions, how-to steps, product stars, breadcrumbs and more.

Recommended schema types:

• FAQPage: adds expandable Q&A to SERPs
• HowTo: numbered steps with images
• Product: price, availability, ratings
• LocalBusiness: map pack eligibility
• BreadcrumbList: better URL display in results
• Article: author, date, publisher for news/blog content

Validate with Google's Rich Results Test. Invalid markup is silently ignored — no penalty, but no benefit either.

Page speed and Core Web Vitals

Google's page experience signals include three Core Web Vitals:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): under 2.5 s — optimise images, fonts and server response
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): under 200 ms — reduce JavaScript execution, use code splitting
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): under 0.1 — set explicit dimensions on images/embeds, avoid late-injecting elements

Test with PageSpeed Insights (lab data) and the CrUX report in Search Console (field data). Focus on mobile performance — Google uses mobile-first indexing.

HTTPS, redirects and crawl errors

Ensure the entire site runs on HTTPS with a valid certificate. Redirect HTTP to HTTPS with a 301. Fix redirect chains (A→B→C should become A→C). Monitor crawl errors in Search Console and fix 404s for pages with inbound links.

Soft 404s (pages returning 200 but showing "not found" content) confuse crawlers — return a proper 404 or 410 status code.