Technical SEO: what to check on your site before sending traffic to it

Technical SEO is not about tricks. It is about your site being readable, understandable and displayable by a search engine without tripping over itself. It is the boring part, and it is the part that decides whether the rest of the effort counts.

The checks below take about an hour, with no tool subscriptions.

1. Every page has its own title

Open a few pages and look at the text in the browser tab. If it says the same thing everywhere — usually the company name — the search engine has no way to tell them apart. Every page needs a title describing that page, in about 60 characters.

2. The description in results is written, not invented

If you do not write the description, Google picks a chunk of text from the page, often badly. Around 155 characters saying what the person will find there and why they should click.

3. One main heading per page

One H1 per page, saying what it is about. Everything else structured into H2 and H3. This is not a style rule, it is how the page structure gets read.

4. Addresses are readable

“/services/software-development” tells you what is coming. “/index.php?p=42&cat=7” tells nobody anything — not the person, not the engine. If you change old addresses, add redirects; otherwise you lose everything those addresses had built up.

5. Images have alt text and dimensions

Alt text describes the image for someone who cannot see it — including the search engine. Dimensions declared in the code stop the page jumping around as it loads, and that jumping is penalised directly.

6. The site loads fast on a phone, on mobile data

Not on your desktop, on fibre. Google evaluates the phone version. The most common cause of slowness is oversized images: a several-megabyte photo displayed at phone width is wasted effort on every single visit.

7. There is a sitemap and a correct robots.txt

The sitemap is the list of your pages, handed to the search engine. Robots.txt says what should not be read. The classic mistake: a robots.txt left over from development that blocks the whole site. Worth checking — it happens more often than anyone would think.

8. One single version of the address

With and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash — if all of them answer, you have four versions of the same page competing with each other. Pick one and redirect the rest to it.

What technical SEO is NOT

• Repeating keywords in the text. It stopped helping long ago and it reads badly.
• Buying links. Real risk of a penalty, for an uncertain benefit.
• Hidden text in the same colour as the background. It gets detected and punished.
• Promising “number one in Google”. Nobody can guarantee that.

The right order

Technical first, then content, then promotion. The other way round does not work: you bring people to a site that loads slowly and does not answer their question, and the conclusion will be that promotion is not worth it.

If you want a check on your own site, send us the address. We will tell you what needs fixing, in the order that matters.

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