SEO

Technical SEO checklist for a brand new website

The things worth doing in your first week: indexing, structured data, Core Web Vitals, internal linking and the handful of settings people forget until it costs them traffic.

GetXtra 7 min read

Technical SEO is not mysterious. It is a short list of things that either exist on your site or do not. Work through this once, properly, and you will never have to panic about it again.

Make sure you can be indexed

  • Confirm robots.txt is not blocking anything important.
  • Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
  • Check that every page has exactly one canonical URL. Duplicate URLs split your ranking signals.
  • Serve one version of your domain — pick https and either www or non-www, then redirect the rest.

Meet the Core Web Vitals thresholds

Google measures real users at the 75th percentile, and the targets are largest contentful paint within 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint within 200 milliseconds, and cumulative layout shift below 0.1. Three fixes get most sites there:

  • Preload your hero image and mark it high priority, and serve it as WebP or AVIF.
  • Always set width and height on images so nothing jumps around while loading.
  • Defer non-critical JavaScript — long tasks are what wreck interaction latency.

Add structured data that is actually true

Mark up what the page really is: Organization for your brand, BreadcrumbList for navigation, Product with a real price for a product, FAQPage for genuine questions, Article for posts. Never mark up ratings you invented. Fabricated review markup gets rich results removed and can earn a manual penalty — and it is trivially easy for a competitor to report.

New pages need links from existing pages to be found and to inherit authority. Every time you publish, add two or three links from older relevant pages. This single habit outperforms most "SEO tools".

Write titles for humans

Keep titles under roughly 60 characters, put the important words first, and make each one distinct. Meta descriptions do not rank you directly, but a good one raises click-through — and clicks are what turn a ranking into traffic.

Then stop fiddling

Once the checklist is done, technical work is not your bottleneck any more. Content and links are. Go and write something worth linking to.

#seo #technical seo #core web vitals #checklist

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