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SEO Checklist

Technical SEO Pre-Launch Audit Checklist

Component	Requirement	Example Implementation / Rule
robots.txt	Guide crawlers, disallow private pages, reference sitemap URL.	`Disallow: /admin/` `Sitemap: https://app.com/sitemap.xml`
sitemap.xml	Expose crawlable public URLs. Exclude dashboard routes.	XML containing `<loc>`, `<lastmod>`, `<priority>` tags.
Canonical URLs	Ensure duplicate pages resolve to one authority. Prevent duplicate penalty.	`<link rel="canonical" href="https://app.com/blog" />`
Structured Data	Inject JSON-LD schemas in head for rich engine snippets (reviews, FAQ).	`<script type="application/ld+json">...</script>`
Meta Tags	Provide unique titles, descriptions, and Open Graph share headers.	`<meta name="description" content="..." />`

Core Web Vitals Optimization Guidelines

1. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) Fixes

Preload the main banner/hero image: <link rel="preload" as="image" href="/hero.webp"/>.
Serve compressed modern image extensions: WebP, AVIF instead of raw PNG/JPG.
Use a CDN (CloudFront/Cloudflare) to speed up server response time (TTFB).

2. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) Fixes

Explicitly write width and height attributes on all image and video tags (e.g. width="800" height="600").
Pre-allocate layout wrapper heights for dynamic UI elements (ads, banners, cookies warning).
Use font-display: swap or font-display: optional to avoid jumps on web font loads.

3. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) Fixes

Avoid blocking the browser main thread with long-running JS execution blocks.
Utilize requestIdleCallback or break tasks down using setTimeout chunks.
Optimize event listeners to return UI feedback instantly before running calculations.

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