BYD TechThe short answer
Technical SEO makes sure search engines can find, read and trust your pages. For a startup site the essentials are: every page reachable and allowed in robots.txt, one canonical address per page, an accurate sitemap submitted to Google and Bing, unique titles and descriptions, fast pages that pass Core Web Vitals, structured data that matches the page, and Search Console set up to report problems. Get these right once, then let content do the ranking.
Key points
- If a page cannot be crawled or indexed, nothing else matters.
- One address per page: https, one host, and a canonical tag.
- A sitemap with real last-modified dates, submitted in Search Console and Bing.
- Unique titles and descriptions, short enough to show whole.
- Technical SEO removes obstacles. Useful content is what ranks.
Crawling and indexing
- robots.txt allows every public page and blocks only what should stay private, such as internal API routes.
- No important page carries a noindex tag by mistake.
- Pages are real links in the HTML, not only reachable through scripts or search boxes.
- Important content is in the HTML the server sends, not loaded later where crawlers may miss it.
- Broken links and redirect chains are fixed.
One address per page
- Everything is served over https, and http redirects to it.
- One host: either the bare domain or www, with the other redirecting with a 301.
- Each page has a canonical tag pointing at its own preferred address.
- Trailing slashes and capital letters are consistent, so one page does not exist at several addresses.
Google’s guide to duplicate URLs explains how it chooses a canonical page, and why sending consistent signals helps it choose yours.
Sitemap and Search Console
- Generate the sitemap from the site itself, so it never lists a page that does not exist.
- List only canonical pages that return a 200 and are meant to be indexed.
- Give each page an accurate last-modified date. Google ignores priority and change frequency.
- Reference the sitemap in robots.txt.
- Verify the domain in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit the sitemap to both.
- Request indexing for the most important pages after launch.
Titles, descriptions and structure
- A unique title on every page, around 60 characters or fewer, leading with what the page is about.
- A unique meta description of about 160 characters or fewer, written as a plain summary.
- One h1 per page, and headings in order.
- Descriptive link text, not "click here".
- Alt text on meaningful images.
Speed and mobile
Pages should load quickly and stay stable on a mid-range phone, not only on a fast laptop. The targets and fixes are in Core Web Vitals explained. The choice of platform affects how easy this is, as Next.js vs WordPress explains.
Structured data
- Organization and WebSite markup on the home page, with the real name, logo and profiles.
- Breadcrumbs on inner pages.
- Article markup on guides and posts, with author and dates.
- Mark up only what the page shows. Google treats markup that does not match the page as spam.
Google’s introduction to structured data lists which types can produce rich results. Others, such as FAQ markup, still help other search engines and AI assistants understand the page.
After the technical work
A technically clean site is ready to rank, and that is all. What actually ranks is content that answers real questions better than other pages, and other sites linking to it. We build sites with this checklist done in website development.
Sources
Checked when this guide was written.
