Eleven SEO fixes you can ship in a day

Every fix below takes an afternoon at most, and you can check each one the same day you make it. None of them will rescue a site that has nothing worth reading on it. What they do is clear the obstacles sitting between a good page and the people looking for it.

They are in the order we would do them, because a few of them make the others easier to measure.

1. Write one title per page, by hand

Auto-generated titles pull from whatever the theme has to hand, which is usually the navigation. That gives you forty pages whose titles start with the same seven words. Open the ten pages you care about. Write a title for each that says what the page is, in the words a reader would type.

Keep it under about 60 characters so it survives truncation in the result.

2. Delete the second SEO plugin

Two plugins that both write titles, canonicals and structured data will fight, and the loser is not always the same one. The symptom is a page whose source carries two <title> tags or two canonical links. Google picks one, and it is often the wrong one.

Pick a plugin. Turn the other one off. Check the page source afterwards.

3. Point every canonical at itself

A canonical tag that points somewhere else is an instruction to drop this page from the index in favour of that one. It gets set wrong by bulk tools more often than you would think. View source on five pages and read the canonical URL. It should be the page you are on, with the same protocol, the same host and the same trailing slash.

4. Fix the redirect chain on your own homepage

Type your domain without www and without https. Count the hops. If http://example.com goes to https://example.com goes to https://www.example.com, that is two hops on the single most requested URL you own. One rule at the edge collapses it to one.

5. Give images real alt text

Alt text is read by screen readers and by image search. “image-1024x768.jpg” helps neither. Describe what the image shows in the sentence you would use if you were reading the page aloud to someone on the phone.

Decorative images take an empty alt attribute, which tells a screen reader to skip them.

6. Add width and height to every image

An image without dimensions has no space reserved for it, so the text below jumps when it loads. That is layout shift, it is measured, and it annoys readers more than it annoys Google. Both attributes go in the HTML, even when the CSS resizes the image later.

7. Compress the hero image

The largest image above the fold is usually the thing your Largest Contentful Paint is waiting on. Export it again at the size it is actually displayed, in WebP or AVIF, and watch the number move. A 1.4 MB header photo shown at 800px wide is the easiest win on a slow site.

8. Cut the render-blocking stylesheets

Open the network tab and count the CSS files loaded before anything paints. A theme with a page builder often ships twenty or more. You will not merge them all in an afternoon. You can usually find two or three loaded on every page for a feature used on one.

9. Link to your own important pages from your own body copy

Internal links are the part of link building you fully control. Pick your five most valuable pages. Search your site for the phrases they should rank for. Link to them from the body text of the posts where those phrases already appear, with anchor text that describes the destination.

Do it by hand. Automated internal-linking plugins produce link patterns that read as automated.

10. Write meta descriptions for the pages that already get impressions

Search Console will tell you which pages are shown a lot and clicked rarely. Those are the ones where a written description pays. Google rewrites descriptions often, so this is not a guaranteed change, and it costs you ten minutes per page.

11. Submit an accurate sitemap and read what comes back

A sitemap listing pages that redirect, 404 or carry a noindex tag is telling Google something untrue about your own site. Generate a fresh one, submit it, then read the Pages report a week later. The report is the only place that will tell you Google has decided to ignore a page you thought was fine.

What none of this fixes

If the pages themselves answer nothing, these eleven changes will make a quiet site slightly faster at being quiet. The work that moves a site is the work of having something specific to say to a specific person. The list above stops technical debris getting in its way.

Our technical SEO work starts with exactly this kind of pass, because the findings tell us which of the harder problems are real.