17 Essential SEO Checklist Items for 2026 (Ultimate Guide)

If you’re looking to start a new blog in 2026, I’ve a quick tip for you. Don’t launch it until you’ve an SEO checklist.

Why? The reason is simple: with an SEO to do list, you can boost your search rankings really quickly even if you’ve a new website. This basic SEO checklist contains 10 major things that I always follow while launching a new blog for better SEO, so it comes in handy for you too.

This basic SEO testing checklist for new websites can help you when launching your latest blog, irrespective of the niche you have chosen. So let’s jump into the details without further ado.

17 Point SEO Checklist for New Websites In 2026

Here’s a quick 10-point SEO list that can save your time and boost your SEO. Let’s first focus on the 3 most important on-page factors which are;

1. Title tags
2. Meta description
3. H2 and H3 tags

These 3 things play a crucial role in increasing your on-page optimization and helps you bring more traffic from search engines to the keywords that you want to rank for.

Quick tip: You can use Rank Math plugin for better optimization of your posts. You can make changes to both title, meta description and tags using this plugin.

1. Title Tags:

Title tag (h1 tag) is the most important ranking factor. Always make sure to create a unique title tag that’s not been used anywhere else (you can use Google search before to make sure you’re using a unique title).

Here’s a quick checklist for title tags:

• Is it unique?
• Have you included your primary keyword in your title?
• Is it less than 70 characters
• Is grammar check done?
• is it helpful to your readers?

2. Meta description:

Your meta description is what pops up when someone searches for a term in Google search (along with the title). So make sure to include it in every post.

Here is a quick checklist for meta description:

• Is it unique?
• Does it contain your primary keywords?
• Is it under 140 characters?
• Is it click-worthy? (click through rate is very important if you want to get better search rankings than your competitors)

3. H2 and H3 tags:

Just like H1 tag, H2 and H3 tags are crucial while optimizing your content. They can also serve you as sub headings to give better experience to your readers while skimming through your posts.

• Included at least one h2 tag with your primary keyword?
• Included at least 2 to 3 h3 tags within your content?

Next, we’ll focus on the linking part which is really critical. Basically there are 2 types of links;

1. Internal links (which are links to your old pages)
2. External links (other sites)

4. Internal Links:

Internal links can help you with better crawling rates from search engines. The more you link to your inner posts whenever you publish or update content, the better it is for your search rankings.

• Did you link to helpful and relevant pages within your website
• Did you link to most popular pages
• Don’t stuff your internal links with keyword based anchor text (make them look natural)

5. Outbound Links:

Most bloggers don’t realise the importance of linking to external and relevant sites from their content. But it’s also one of the ranking factors when you’re linking to relevant and authority sites.

• Did you link to relevant pages from other sites?
• Did you link to authoritative sites within your niche for better rankings?
• Are there any affiliate links? If yes, open them in new tabs and add rel=nofollow tags (it’s a must for every affiliate link)

6. Images

Using at least one image in every blog post you publish can do wonders and bring you a ton of visitors, as people also use Google Image Search to find their favorite content. Make sure to give credit if you’re using others’ images. I recommend using free copyright images whenever possible.

• Are you using at least one image per post?
• Is your image copyright-free? If not, give credits (with a link)
• Are your images cropped to the proper size in pixels?
• Have you optimised your image size
• Alt tag included?

Check out the detailed image SEO guide for a complete understanding of images.

7. URL permalinks:

URL structure plays a vital role in your search engine rankings. So truncate your URL structure for better search engine visibility for your keywords that you want to rank for. Also use short and sweet URLs for the best user and search experience.

• Is your URL short and sweet?
• Does it include your primary keyword?
• Remove basic words like a, an, the, etc
• Is your URL structure optimized well, such as https://www.example.com/simple-example and not https://www.example.com/p=362

8. Keywords:

Without keywords, you can’t rank higher in search results. It’s essential for everyone to do keyword research before they even begin writing their posts. Try to use as many long tail keywords as possible if you want to get more rankings, because they contribute to 70% of search traffic.

• Are you using your primary keyword within your title, alt tags, h2, h3 tags etc?
• Are you using LSI relevant keywords for your primary keyword?

9. Page speed:

Go to Pingdom tools to find out your site loading time. If it’s taking more than 3 seconds to load, use these tips to speed up your site.

• Is your page loading within 3 seconds? (if not, use PageSpeed Insights by Google to get recommendations and make your page loading times faster)
• Don’t use any flashy images or gigantic files to slow down your page speed and website performance

10. User engagement:

The social shares you get, the comments your content gets, and every user engagement count in getting better search rankings.

• Are you using social sharing buttons to make it easy for your audience to share your blog posts?
• Are you using CTA (call to action, like asking for comments or shares) at the end of the content?
• Are you replying to your comments?

11. Choose between the www and non-www versions

To a regular user, the 2 addresses https://www.example.com and https://example.com might appear to be the same, but to Google, these two are entirely different. You may say that both correspond to the same page, and in fact they do, but it is always recommended to have both versions on the complete site for better SEO.

You may either use the link “www” or “non-www” while using the linking tags throughout your site. In case there’s a mismatch, Google would have to automatically discard any one of them, leading to poor optimization. To resolve the issue, select one of them and redirect all pages from the second version to the primary version.

The action element here is to set up an SEO-friendly (301) redirect from one version to the preferred version.

12. Move your site to the HTTPS version

Did you ever think of that extra ‘s’ in https? Well, it stands for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Hackers can’t intercept any of your data because it’s encrypted during your connection to a website. Here are a few reasons why you should enable HTTPS on your website immediately.

• Let’s say two websites are competing for the same position for one particular user query, then there is a tie. In that case, Google prefers the one that has HTTPS enabled. To provide a better experience, Google frequently updates its algorithm.
• If your website accepts credit cards or has login functionality, it must have HTTPS. You should instill trust in users’ minds that you are making an effort to protect their private information from being compromised.
• If you want certain pages to load almost instantly on mobile, they should be AMP-ready, and for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), SSL is very important.
• Google is going to start indexing mobile, so HTTPS is preferred over HTTP in the index.
• If HTTPS is not present on your website, the updated Chrome 56 will start displaying Not Secure in the browser bar. When it shows that to the user, no one will dare to enter your website and compromise their private information. So, move to https today itself.

If you don’t want to lose revenue and want your SEO to be strong, enable HTTPS on your website.

13. Install Google Analytics, Set up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking your site’s stats. It provides vital information like how many visitors viewed your site in the past, how many active users are currently on the site, your bounce rate, how many visits were from organic search, how many were direct, and how many were from Facebook, etc. If you already have a Google account, setting up Analytics would be a matter of seconds.

Google Analytics provides basic info about your site, but if you need some deep info like what pages are being indexed, how your site is responding, what the errors and warnings are from Google’s point of view, whether your site is suffering from any kind of bugs or shortcomings, etc. These webmaster tools also allow you to contact the search engine support team directly in case you think that you are being penalized. It’s a good idea to set up accounts on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Here are some obvious reasons that force me to setup an account on Google Search Console especially:

– Specify the GEO Targeting for my websites
– To keep track of the various notifications coming from Google in the form of messages
– Links to my website
– Google index status.
– HTML improvement areas
– To keep track of various crawling errors for my website
– For making request to remove certain URL’s from Google index
– For XML sitemap submission etc

Link Google Search Console Account with Google Analytics

Once you have prepared your analytics and search console accounts, you can further proceed to connect both of them which would help you to get the complete information from once dashboard itself. You should check this guide from Google in case you don’t know how to link your  GWT account with Google Analytics account.

14. Set up robots.txt file

The robots.txt file contains information on which pages of your site must be crawled by search engine bots and which should be ignored. In case some of your pages have a similar type of content, it is always recommended to use a robots.txt file, or else the search engine might mark the pages as spam. This file is placed in the root folder of the website and provides basic info on the pages which the bots should crawl and then index in the search engine’s database.

If you haven’t set up a robots.txt file on your website, you should add it immediately to make your website more search engine-friendly. You should pay special attention when allowing or disallowing specific files or folders on your website from being indexed by search engines.

Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google and Bing for faster indexing via Webmaster tools

It is agreed that search engine bots continue to crawl and index a blog hourly to deliver the most relevant, up-to-date results. Sometimes, a few posts under the blog are skipped for unwelcome reasons. These posts may be indexed later, but it might take a lot of time. To speed up indexing of your site, experts recommend creating a sitemap.xml file that outlines your site’s structure, then submitting it to search engines like Google and Bing via your webmaster tools accounts independently.

This plugin automatically generates XML sitemaps for WordPress-based websites. This plugin is really helpful for those guys who don’t know how to create an XML sitemap file for their website or blog.

15. Take care of 404 Error Pages

It becomes very disappointing as well as irritating for a visitor if he lands up on an “Error 404: Page not found”. These silly mistakes leave a bad impression on the mind of the visitor, and he would not simply just close the page increasing your bounce rate, but also would give priority to any other site over your site.

This is the reason that you should start showing 404 error page for all those requests where no page exists on your website. I have seen some website owners adding links for important sections of their website on a 404 page to help website visitors find pages of their interest.

16. Find long tail keywords

Targeting long tail keywords increases your site monthly search visitors. Well, what are long tail keywords? These are the 3 or 4 keywords that are more specific. They get less traffic but have high conversion rate.

Use Google keyword planner to find long tail keywords on your seed keyword(keyword that you want to target). Make sure that the keyword you selected is relevant.

Apart from Google keyword planner, you can also use tools like Semrush, KWFinder, Google Auto complete tool, Ubersuggest to find long tail keywords.

Once you collect long tail keywords of your niche, then start using them in your post. SEO is all about keywords. To get the most out of it, you will always have to thoroughly analyze your keywords and search for new ones using Google Keyword Tool.

You should have targeted keywords in mind for most pages you publish on your website. You should use these keywords intelligently on targeted pages, such as in the URL, title, metadata, heading, and the rest of the page content. But don’t try to do keyword stuffing. Keywords should be added in a way that they seem to be adding value to the content of your website.

17. link-building

Link building has always been a weapon for SEO construction. A website with a good number of backlinks raises a trust factor in the eyes of the search engine, thus helping you to gain high rankings. To improve your website’s rankings, start spending time on these link-building practices.

1. Creating links from Infographics:

Good content consistently earns links on its own. So, infographics depend on the success of the content’s creation. To experience excellent results, your infographic should reach your potential audience. How can you reach a wider audience and get links?

• Social media advertising: You can try Facebook ads or StumbleUpon Ads. Don’t keep more expectations. It tends to bounce quickly, but the conversion rate is lower. But it helps to some extent, so why miss this chance to get links?
• Submit to relevant sites: If you use sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon in a proper way, then you can get some links from here. Just observe how you tag posts on StumbleUpon and in what subReddits you are submitting your content.
• Twitter: You can’t imagine how many relationships you can build using Twitter. Find the most influential accounts on Twitter related to your niche. Follow them and promote their stuff (Re-tweet). They will recognise and retweet your stuff too, which will help a lot not only in gaining traffic but also in getting links.

Do manual outreach. It takes good amount of time but it’s all worth.

2. Building links from guest posts:

Guest posting is one of the powerful link-building strategies. Have a list of sites that accept guest posts before you write a single word. You can search for those sites by typing “keyword” + “write for us” or

“Keyword” + “guest post”.

Build links with free guest posting websites. Once you have the list of sites that accept guest posts, check their guest post submission guidelines and the types of content they accept. So that you can tailor your post according to their audience.

Write an awesome headline, outline your content, and produce killer stuff. Add 2 to 3 additional links to your brand-relevant pages on other domains. Don’t keep unnecessary links, as the real purpose of a link in a guest post is to support the content you have written for them.

3. Using the blogger outreach technique to build links: 

Google loves those sites that have credibility, which means how many authoritative sites your site is linked to. If you want only high-quality sites to link to your site, start using blogger outreach.

Here are some blogger outreach techniques to help you build high-quality links.

• Find bloggers’ email addresses. You can use Email hunter tool to find their email addresses. Email is the fastest way to reach out to bloggers.
• Follow writers and bloggers on Twitter and start interacting with them. Build relationships with them, and they will undoubtedly include your link in their posts. Check who has tweeted your content. Reach out to them and thank them for sharing.
• If you find any broken links on other sites, reach out to the blog owner and suggest one of your similar posts as a replacement. Some will be so grateful that you are helping them find errors and fix them. There is a good chance they will replace the broken link with your suggested one.

To find posts that have a lot of links, you can use tools like Semrush. So that you can create a much better piece of content.

Bonus Read: Check out this YouTube video SEO checklist to make sure your YouTube videos rank well.

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Final Thoughts

I always use an SEO checklist for all new websites I run to improve their search rankings quickly. That’s the reason why I decided to write a detailed post to help you boost your SEO.

Are you maintaining any such SEO list that you use to run through before or after your website goes live? Please share your thoughts and ideas on the SEO testing list in the comments section. In case you have any questions for me, do let me know in the comments.