First, can it be indexed?
- Search engine visibility is not switched off in settings — this happens more than you would think
- No accidental noindex on important pages
- The sitemap exists, is current and is submitted
- Nothing important is blocked in robots.txt
A staging site left indexable, or a live site left blocked after launch, are two of the most common and most damaging technical faults.
Titles and descriptions
Every page needs a written title and meta description. Defaults and duplicates are wasted opportunities on the most visible text you control.
Check for duplicates specifically — several pages sharing a title is common and it confuses both search engines and searchers.
Structure
- One h1 per page, describing the page
- Logical heading hierarchy beneath it
- Canonical tags correct, particularly with categories and pagination
- Clean URLs without dates or numbers where they add nothing
Then the crawl
| Check | Common finding |
|---|---|
| Broken internal links | Several, usually from old edits |
| Redirect chains | Old redirects pointing at old redirects |
| Missing alt text | Widespread |
| Orphan pages | Usually two or three, sometimes important |
| Thin pages | Old posts and empty archives |
Do it twice a year
Technical problems accumulate quietly through ordinary editing. A crawl every six months catches them while they are small.
Half a day, twice a year, and the site stays healthy rather than needing a rescue.