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By Christian Hernández · Published: · Updated:
If your site doesn’t show up on Google or gets few visits, the cause is almost always the basics. This list covers the 18 recommendations with the most impact, in plain language. Check them off as you go.
What Google reads first to understand what each page is about.
Why it matters: The title (the <title> tag) is the first thing people see in Google’s results and one of the strongest signals of what the page is about.
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Why it matters: It doesn’t raise your ranking by itself, but Google often shows it under the title. A good description makes more people pick your result.
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Why it matters: The H1 is the main heading. It confirms, to Google and to the visitor, that they landed in the right place.
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Why it matters: Subheadings make the text easy to scan and give Google context about each section.
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Why it matters: Google favors helpful content written for people. A page that fully answers the question competes better than one stuffed with keywords.
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Why it matters: A clear URL tells visitors and Google what’s on the page before they open it.
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Well-optimized images bring visits from Google Images and make your site accessible.
Why it matters: The alt attribute describes the image to people using screen readers (accessibility and ADA) and tells Google what it shows.
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Why it matters: Heavy images are the most common cause of slow pages, especially on phones.
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The foundation that lets Google find, crawl and index your site without trouble.
Why it matters: HTTPS is a trust signal. And if your site loads both with and without “www”, Google may see it as two duplicate sites.
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Why it matters: Google mainly evaluates the mobile version of your site. If content is missing or broken on mobile, that’s what counts.
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Why it matters: Core Web Vitals measure how fast your page loads, how fast it responds and how stable it looks. They’re part of the experience Google takes into account.
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Why it matters: The sitemap hands Google the list of pages you want found; robots.txt tells it which parts not to crawl.
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Why it matters: If the same page opens under several URLs (with parameters, filters or capital letters), the canonical tells Google which one is the main one and avoids duplicate content.
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Why it matters: Links to pages that don’t exist frustrate visitors and waste the time Google spends crawling your site.
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How to help Google see which of your pages matter and where your business is.
Why it matters: Internal links help Google discover your pages and understand which ones matter most.
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Why it matters: It describes your business, products or articles in a format Google understands, and can make your results show extra information.
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Why it matters: If you serve customers in a city, your Business Profile is what puts you on Google Maps and in local results.
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What you don’t measure, you can’t improve.
Why it matters: Search Console shows which searches you appear for, how many clicks you get and whether Google has trouble indexing your site.
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basicseo.net crawls your whole site and tells you which pages have problems with the title, meta description, H1 or image alt text. It’s free.
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