The Technical SEO Checklist I Run Before Launching a New Site

When people think about SEO, content and keywords come to mind first. But no matter how good the content is, if Google cannot crawl your site, cannot index it, or your page loads slowly, that content does nothing for you. Technical SEO is exactly the work of laying that groundwork.

The list below follows the order I have used on the sites I have built for companies since 2025 and on the two brands whose SEO I currently run. I like having every box ticked before a site goes live.

1. Pick one domain and stay on it

A site can be reached at four different addresses:

http://ornek.com
http://www.ornek.com
https://ornek.com
https://www.ornek.com

Google can treat these as different sites, and your authority gets split. Pick one (I prefer https:// without www) and send the other three to it with a 301 redirect. Putting a canonical tag on every page is the insurance policy for this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://ornek.com/hizmetler">

2. Put robots.txt and sitemap.xml in place from the start

Both belong in the root directory. robots.txt says where not to look, and sitemap.xml says where to look.

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /ozel/

Sitemap: https://ornek.com/sitemap.xml

3. Write a unique title and description for every page

<title> and <meta name="description"> are the two fields that show up in search results. They directly determine your click-through rate.

• Title: 50–60 characters. Put the important word first. The pattern: Main Topic — Benefit | Brand
• Description: 140–160 characters. It has no direct effect on ranking, but it does affect clicks. End it with a call to action.
• Every page should have exactly one <h1>, and the heading hierarchy should not skip levels: h1 → h2 → h3.

4. Speed — on mobile in particular

There are three metrics Google calls Core Web Vitals. Before launch I look at the mobile tab in PageSpeed Insights — the desktop score almost always comes out fine, and the real gap shows up on mobile.

The four changes that make the biggest difference:

• Shrink your images. This one alone is the biggest win. Switch to WebP and upload them at the size they will actually be displayed at — do not serve a photo that is 3000 pixels wide into a 400-pixel slot.
• Set width and height. If you do not give an image its dimensions, the page jumps when it loads and CLS suffers.
• Add loading="lazy" to images below the fold.
• Drop unnecessary libraries. Instead of loading a 100 KB library for one slider, writing a few lines of CSS is usually possible.

5. Add structured data

Schema.org markup tells Google what the page is. Used correctly, your search result shows up with enhancements like stars, prices and dates, and gets clicked more.

What I use, by site type:

• Company site: Organization + LocalBusiness
• Personal/portfolio: Person
• Blog post: BlogPosting
• E-commerce: Product + Offer + AggregateRating
• FAQ: FAQPage

Once you have written it, validate it with Google's Rich Results Test; broken markup is worse than no markup at all.

6. Set up Search Console on day one

This is the most skipped item on the list, and the most valuable one. Without Search Console, you are guessing at what your site is doing in search.

1. Verify the site (a DNS record is the most durable method).
2. Submit the sitemap.xml URL.
3. Test the homepage with "URL Inspection" and request indexing.
4. In the first week, open the "Pages" report and read why any pages were not indexed.

A month later, the "Performance" report will show you which searches people are arriving from. Build your content strategy on that data, not on guesses.

7. Launch-day final check

The list I run through quickly before going live:

• Is there a leftover noindex in the page source?
• Is robots.txt accidentally blocking everything?
• Is the SSL certificate working, and are there any mixed content warnings?
• Is there a 404 page, and does it link back to the homepage?
• Do all internal links work?
• Do the images have alt text?
• Did you actually open the site on a phone and browse it? (A browser simulation is not enough.)

Technical SEO is invisible work: when you get it right nobody notices, and when you get it wrong nobody notices for a long time either. That is why I keep a list.

• Technical SEO
• Search Console
• Core Web Vitals
• Sitemap
• Schema.org