A 5-minute SEO checklist for your homepage

Your homepage is usually the page with the most links pointing at it, so it is the one search engines and social networks look at first. You don't need an audit tool with a monthly fee to catch the most common problems. Five checks cover most of them, and each takes about a minute.

Open your homepage, right-click, choose View page source, and search (Ctrl+F) for the tags below.

1. One H1 that says what the page is about

Search for <h1. You want exactly one, and it should describe the page in plain words.

<h1>Free SEO and developer tools, no sign-up</h1>

Common problems: the H1 is missing because the logo is the only heading, there are several H1s because a theme reused the tag for styling, or the H1 just says "Welcome" or "Home". Headings help search engines and screen-reader users understand the page, so they should be about the content, not the layout.

2. A meta description you wrote yourself

Search for name="description".

<meta name="description" content="130+ free SEO and developer tools: check a page's SEO, test robots.txt, compress images and more. No sign-up.">

Google doesn't use the description for ranking, and it sometimes rewrites the snippet. A good description still helps, because it is often what people read in the search results before deciding to click. If the tag is missing, Google picks some text from the page itself. Keep it to about 150 to 160 characters and describe what the visitor gets.

3. A canonical URL, and no stray "noindex"

Search for rel="canonical" and for noindex.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/">

The canonical tag tells search engines which version of the URL is the main one (https or http, with or without www, with or without tracking parameters). It should point to the page's own preferred address.

A noindex in a robots meta tag tells search engines to leave the page out of their results. It often gets left behind after a site moves from staging to production, and it will quietly keep a homepage out of Google. It can also come as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which doesn't appear in the page source, so check the response headers too.

4. Alt text on every image that carries meaning

Search for <img and look at the alt attributes.

<img src="dashboard.png" alt="SEO Checker report with a score of 92 out of 100">
<img src="divider.svg" alt="">

Alt text is read by screen readers and helps image search understand the picture. Describe what the image shows. Purely decorative images should have an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them. Leaving out the attribute entirely is the one option to avoid.

5. Open Graph tags, so shared links look right

Search for og:.

<meta property="og:title" content="SEOpeck: free SEO and developer tools">
<meta property="og:description" content="130+ free tools, no sign-up.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og-image.png">

Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp and many other apps use these tags to build the preview card when someone shares your link. Without them you get a bare URL or a random image from the page. An image of 1200 × 630 px works well almost everywhere.

Check all five at once

If you'd rather not read page source, I built a free SEO Checker that tests all five of these on any URL. It also checks HTTPS, redirects, response time, subheadings, word count, the mobile viewport and structured data, and gives a score out of 100 with a short fix for each problem. No sign-up needed.

Run it on your homepage, fix anything marked as a problem, and then run it on your two or three most important pages. That's usually the fastest SEO win a small site can get.