The SEO basics every new website needs — and how to stop doing them by hand

Search engines reward sites that are easy to read and trustworthy. Most of that is a checklist — boring, repetitive, and easy to get wrong if you do it by hand on every page. Here's the list, and the case for never touching it manually again.

The checklist that actually moves rankings

• A unique, descriptive title and meta description on every page — not the homepage's repeated everywhere.
• A canonical URL so duplicate-looking pages don't compete with each other.
• A sitemap and robots file so crawlers find every page and skip the ones you don't want indexed.
• Structured data (JSON-LD) so products, articles and breadcrumbs can earn rich results and AI citations.
• Fast loading: a preloaded hero image, sensible fonts, no render-blocking junk.
• Alt text on images for accessibility and image search.
• Open Graph and Twitter tags so shared links look like a real preview, not a bare URL.

None of this is hard. All of it is tedious. Tedious-but-important is exactly what should be automated.

Why automatic beats a checklist

A human doing this by hand forgets a page, or pastes the wrong description, or never updates the sitemap after adding a product. A site that derives its SEO from its own content can't drift: rename a page and the title, breadcrumb, sitemap entry and structured data all update together. xigzag works this way — every page you publish ships with correct metadata, a live sitemap, structured data and the speed basics, with a per-site SEO health check that tells you if anything's thin.

What's left for you

Write for real people. Give each page a clear job and good content. Add alt text that describes the picture. The machine-readable scaffolding — the part that's easy to neglect — should already be done.