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Web presence readiness checklist

Last updated: June 13, 2025

OK… let’s collect everything you need to be the most discoverable – and to have the best chance for the best rich sharing assets and general experience for people finding your site.

You could think of this as “Optimizing your site for Search Engines” (Search Engine Optimization / SEO) but that always sounded like you were optimizing the engine… not FOR the searches.

Today, your site is also being visited and evaluated by a growing ecosystem of crawlers, bots, recommendation engines, LLM-based assistants (like ChatGPT), voice-activated systems (like Siri and Alexa), content summarization tools, shopping AI, and even third-party knowledge graphs that feed into social platforms and apps. It’s not just about Google’s search / and who knows — things might change drastically. So, let’s make sure we’re taking advantage of everything we can.

Robots.txt

If you block things (first off note they might not listen to you anyway) – but if they are blocked – then you’re page won’t be crawl-able – so, that’s the first thing to consider. What are those rules? Where are they set? In your project? Or at a higher level – like your host or something out of your control? Who do you want to allow? Who do you want to block? Do you have any ability to rate limit?

HTML element

Deciding who can crawl your site

# in terminal
curl https://example.com
curl example.com

curl --head example.com
curl -I example.com          #same, but with annoying shorthand


# in your robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Give these a shot in order / in different combinations

Semantic HTML (a functional web page)

This comes first because no bot or AI can do anything useful if the core HTML is broken or meaningless. If you’ve gone through DFTW, well – you know all about that to an expert level. But most people seem to totally brush this off. Lame. It’s not just about your eyes. It’s about everyone and every thing being able to read and explore your content (otherwise / why have it at all). Technically this also includes a language and an official <title> (but we put that in the next part). So, get it! the page will be more discoverable if it isn’t broken or incorrectly authored. The higher the quality of definition – the more likely it will be received and chosen as the canonical source.

Getting distracted from WORK!!! so – I fed my general outline into the LLM to make a loose list for me to come back to later — so, I don’t get off track. Want to help flesh all this out and test it – and document it with me!?!?

 

 

 

Web Presence Readiness Checklist — Outline (next steps)

✅ Already covered:

1️⃣ Gatekeeping / robots.txt

2️⃣ Semantic HTML

Next steps — to fill in later:

3️⃣ Title & Description

  • Title (<title>)

  • Meta description (<meta name=”description”>)

  • Purpose: defines how your page shows up in AI outputs, search, chat, and previews.

4️⃣ Open Graph & Twitter Cards

  • og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, og:url

  • twitter:card, twitter:title, etc.

  • Purpose: defines how your page appears when shared or cited.

5️⃣ Structured Data (Schema.org)

  • Service pages → Service, LocalBusiness, Offer, Review

  • Portfolio pages → CollectionPage, ImageGallery

  • About page → AboutPage, LocalBusiness

  • Contact page → ContactPage, LocalBusiness

  • Blog posts → BlogPosting (if you have a blog)

  • Purpose: helps AI and search engines understand what type of page this is and what it contains.

6️⃣ Sitemap

  • /sitemap.xml

  • Reference it in robots.txt

  • Purpose: gives bots an explicit list of what pages to crawl.

7️⃣ Media readiness

  • Meaningful alt text on images

  • Descriptive filenames

  • Image dimensions

  • Modern formats (webp, avif)

  • Purpose: ensures images are properly understood and surfaced by AI, search, and social.

8️⃣ Performance & accessibility

  • Core Web Vitals → page load speed, layout stability

  • Accessibility basics → proper alt text, contrast, keyboard nav, landmark roles

  • Purpose: makes your content usable → some AI rankings and SEO systems now take this into account.

9️⃣ NAP consistency & trust signals

  • Name / Address / Phone consistency (on page and in schema)

  • Privacy policy

  • Terms of service

  • About page with real humans or org info

  • Purpose: improves trust signals to AI and search engines.

10️⃣ Monitoring & verification

  • Set up Google Search Console

  • Set up Bing Webmaster Tools

  • Monitor AI surfacing when possible (Perplexity, ChatGPT plugins, etc.)

  • Purpose: track whether your optimizations are working.

Optional “cool stuff” layer (if you want to teach it):

  • Testing bot access with curl or Cloudflare analytics

  • Adding SiteNavigationElement schema to help bots understand your nav

  • Using canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content issues

That’s your skeleton — ready for you to come back and fill in each part in your voice and tone.

If you want, I can also give you a one-sentence “why this layer matters” for each section — super handy when writing it out. Want me to prep that too so you can grab it later? Just say “go.”
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