Technical SEO, my checklist before shipping a project

When someone asks me to “make it rank well on Google,” the first thing I do is lower their expectations: nothing I’m about to describe here guarantees the top spot. Technical SEO doesn’t rank a site by itself — what it does is clear away the obstacles that stop a search engine from understanding and trusting your content. Everything else (authority, links, genuinely useful content) is a different conversation, and usually a longer one.

With that clear, here’s what I always review before considering a project done:

• A single H1 per page, and one that actually describes the content — not "Welcome" or just the company name.
• Every image with its alt. If purely decorative, an empty alt is fine, but decided on purpose, not forgotten.
• A properly resolved canonical on every URL, especially on listings with filters or pagination, where it's easy to end up with duplicate content without realising it.
• Its own meta description per page. The site-wide generic one is better than nothing, but it shows.
• A sitemap.xml generated automatically on every build, not one someone wrote by hand two years ago that nobody has touched since.
• Structured data (JSON-LD) where it genuinely makes sense: articles, breadcrumbs, organisation. I don't add it to every page just because.

The mistake I’ve seen most often (and made myself)

The classic one is a noindex that gets left on. During development, the whole site usually carries noindex so Google doesn’t index a half-finished version — and every now and then I’ve forgotten to remove it when going to production. The page loads perfectly, looks perfect, and simply doesn’t show up in any search engine. Since then it’s the first thing I check when deploying, even before looking at performance.

What I don’t do

I don’t stuff the <title> with keywords shoehorned in, and I don’t add hidden text “for the search engine.” That stopped working over a decade ago, and if it ever works, it’s only until Google detects it and penalises the whole site. I’d rather have a title that describes the page well and a clean URL than any trick that sounds like a shortcut.