🔎 Basic SEO Check
Inspect title, meta description, canonical, OG tags, Twitter Card, heading structure, and missing image alts — all with just a URL.
📖 What this check tells you
This check fetches one page and looks at what a search engine reads first: the title, meta description, heading structure, canonical, robots meta, hreflang and image alt text. It does not predict rankings. What it flags is the layer beneath ranking — the preconditions for being crawled and indexed at all. Fixing them will not necessarily move you up, but leaving them broken keeps you out of the running. Clear this layer before you start on ranking work.
| Item | What it means | How to fix it |
|---|---|---|
<title> |
This becomes the headline in search results. Google truncates by pixel width, which works out to roughly 60 characters in English or 30 full-width characters in Japanese. | If it is too long, cut from the front, not the back — the tail is what gets truncated, so put the site or brand name last. Being unique per page matters more than length; check that a template is not giving every page the same title. |
<link rel="canonical"> |
Declares which URL is authoritative when the same content is reachable at several. It consolidates duplicates from query parameters or www versus non-www. | Use an absolute URL, and normally point it at the page itself. Relative paths, or a template that points every page at the home page, cause real damage. If the canonical target is noindex or a 404, the page pointing at it drops out of the index too. |
| Heading structure (h1-h6) | Flags a missing h1, several h1s, or an h3 arriving without an h2 above it. It is a proxy for whether the document's skeleton is legible. | One h1 per page, matching the page's actual subject. Do not pick a heading level for its size — use CSS for that. Wrapping the logo in an h1 is another common template mistake. |
| robots meta / noindex | A noindex keeps the page out of the index entirely. Staging settings surviving into production is a remarkably common way this goes wrong. |
Remove it immediately if it is on production unintentionally. It can be set through the X-Robots-Tag response header as well as the HTML meta, so check both. Afterwards, use "Request indexing" in Search Console to prompt a recrawl. |
A clean result here does not guarantee indexing. If Search Console keeps reporting "Discovered — currently not indexed", the question is no longer technical: it is whether the page carries anything of its own. A thin, template-generated page passes this check with full marks.