Search engine optimisation starts long before keywords. If search engines cannot crawl, render and understand a page quickly, even excellent content struggles to rank. This checklist is the baseline Productive IT applies when we design or audit a business website.

Crawl and index

  • A clean robots.txt that never blocks CSS, JavaScript or key pages.
    • An XML sitemap listing only canonical, indexable URLs, submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
      • One canonical URL per page, with www and non-www, http and https all redirecting to it.
        • No orphan pages: every important page is linked from navigation or related content.

        Page fundamentals

        • A unique title tag under about 60 characters that leads with the topic.
          • A meta description of roughly 150 characters that promises a specific outcome.
            • One H1, logical H2 and H3 headings, and descriptive alt text on every meaningful image.
              • Open Graph and Twitter tags so shared links show the right title and image.

              Speed and experience

              Core Web Vitals reward pages that load and respond fast. Compress and resize images, serve modern formats, enable gzip or Brotli, set long cache lifetimes for static files and remove unused JavaScript. A fast site helps rankings and conversions at the same time.

              Structured data

              Add Organization and WebSite schema sitewide, Service schema on service pages, Article schema on blog posts and FAQPage schema where you answer common questions. Validate everything with the Rich Results Test.

              Local signals

              For businesses serving a city or region, keep name, address and phone identical across the site and your Google Business Profile, and create location-relevant service pages rather than thin duplicates.

              FAQ

              How often should I audit technical SEO? Quarterly, and after every redesign or platform change.

              Do I need a plugin or tool? Tools help you find issues, but fixes happen in templates, server settings and content.

              Productive IT designs SEO-aware websites and fixes technical issues on existing ones. Start a focused conversation through productiveit.in.