An SEO checklist for new pages that takes ten minutes

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Introduction

A page is written, approved and published. Six months later an audit reports that it has no meta description, a duplicate title, no internal links pointing at it, and an uncompressed image four thousand pixels wide.

None of that was a difficult problem. Each item takes under a minute at the point of publishing and becomes a line in a report months later, by which time the page has been quietly underperforming for half a year. A short checklist applied at publication removes nearly all of it.

1. An SEO checklist for new pages begins with a specific purpose

Know what the page is for before publishing it.

One clear subject, one audience, and one thing it should achieve. Pages covering three subjects loosely compete with your own existing pages and satisfy nobody who lands on them, and no amount of later optimisation resolves that.

2. Check it does not duplicate an existing page

The step most often skipped.

Search your own site for the subject before publishing. If a page already covers it, improving that one is nearly always better than adding a second, which splits attention between two weaker pages indefinitely.

3. Write a title that would earn a click

Not merely a label.

Under sixty characters, leading with what the page delivers rather than the company name, and distinct from every other title on the site. This is the single highest-return item on the list and it takes two minutes.

4. Write the meta description

Cheap and frequently omitted.

One or two sentences describing what somebody gets from this page, within the length that displays. It may be rewritten by a search engine, and on a page with one clear purpose it usually is not.

5. Check the address and the heading structure

Two quick structural items.

A short readable address with hyphens and no dates, one main heading, and subheadings that describe the sections in order. Both are much easier to get right now than to change after the page has been live.

6. Add internal links in both directions

The item that determines whether it is found.

Link to the new page from two or three relevant existing pages, and link out from it to whatever it naturally relates to. A page published with no inbound links may not be discovered at all, and this takes five minutes.

7. Sort the images before uploading

Prevents a speed problem rather than fixing one later.

Resize to the dimensions actually displayed, compress properly, and write alt text describing each image. Doing this at upload avoids the retrospective project that never gets scheduled.

8. Check it on a phone before publishing

Where the faults are.

Read the page on a handset: the heading, the spacing, any tables or images, and whether the action is reachable. Pages are written on desktops and read on phones, and the difference is where the problems live.

9. Confirm it can be found after publishing

The final verification.

Check that it appears in your sitemap, is not marked no-index, and is reachable by clicking from the home page. A week later, confirm it is indexed, which takes thirty seconds and catches the rare cases where something went wrong.

Keep the list somewhere the person publishing will actually see it, and keep it short enough that they use it. A ten-item checklist that gets followed is worth considerably more than a comprehensive one that gets ignored after the second week.

Conclusion

Apply a short checklist at publication rather than discovering the same omissions in an audit months later.

Confirm the page has one clear purpose, check it does not duplicate something you already have, write a distinct title under sixty characters that leads with the benefit, write a meta description, set a clean address and a coherent heading structure, add internal links both to and from the page, resize and compress images and write alt text before uploading, read the page on a phone, verify after publishing that it is indexable and reachable, and keep the list short enough to be used.