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Web publishingState as of: 2026-10

Technical SEO priorities for small static sites

A weighted list of the technical SEO points that matter for a family of small static sites on separate domains, and which of them a build can generate.

Research question: Which technical SEO points still matter for small static sites on several domains, and which can the build generate instead of a person?

Project requirement

Several small static sites, each on its own domain. A flat checklist treats every point the same, so scarce time does not go to what matters, and repeatable points should leave the manual work.

Method and validation

  • Weighted list based on Google Search Central guidance: critical, high, medium, low.
  • Each point classified: derivable from the pages and the site configuration (build) or page-level content (person).
  • The generator produces the build points for the sample sites; a link checker runs on the built output, external links included.

Findings

  • Critical: no accidental noindex, and a responsive mobile layout.
  • High: unique title, no broken links, image weight and Core Web Vitals, enforced HTTPS.
  • Medium: sitemap and robots.txt, canonical links, meta description, one H1, alt texts, JSON-LD, descriptive internal links.
  • Low: heading hierarchy, URL slugs and llms.txt.
  • The build can generate the sitemap, robots.txt, canonical links, JSON-LD with visible data only, HTTPS and old-URL 301 redirects, and llms.txt, and it can check links.
  • Each domain counts as a separate site; the same content on two domains is duplicate content and needs a canonical link or different text.
  • The meta keywords tag has not been a ranking signal for Google since 2009.
  • llms.txt is cheap to generate, but Google Search does not use it; how many AI assistants read it is unverified.

Decision

Generate everything that can be derived from the pages and the configuration. Titles, descriptions and alt texts stay page-level content. llms.txt is included because it costs nothing, not as an SEO tool.

Limits and open questions

  • Time-sensitive: the role of llms.txt and structured data support can change; review planned for 2027-04.
  • Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools submission stays a manual step per domain, and the list does not measure actual rankings.

Sources