A technical SEO checklist for Arabic and English websites.
Most technical SEO problems are not mysterious. They are a sitemap that lists URLs nobody links to, an Arabic page that claims to be English, or a hero image that takes six seconds on a phone. This checklist covers the parts you can verify yourself.
1. Can a crawler reach every important page?
Open robots.txt and read it as a stranger. Make sure it does not block CSS, JavaScript, images or whole sections by accident, and that the sitemap it points to is the live one. Then check that each key page is reachable through ordinary links, not only through a sitemap entry or a menu that needs JavaScript.
For every language version, confirm the URL appears in the sitemap with its alternates. A sitemap that lists thousands of query-string duplicates is noise; one that lists the real page set is a map.
2. Canonical, hreflang and pagination pairs
Each page should point to itself with an absolute canonical URL, and each language pair should reference the other, including an x-default. The most common bilingual failure is Arabic pages declaring the English URL as canonical, which removes the Arabic page from consideration entirely.
Be consistent about the host: choose one of example.com, www.example.com and redirect the other permanently. Mixed hosts split signals and make reports unreadable.
3. Titles, descriptions and headings that match the page
The title should say what the page is and where it applies. The description is not a ranking factor, but it is what a person reads before deciding; write it for the decision, not for a keyword tool. One H1 that matches the page's job beats five H1s fighting each other.
In Arabic, check that pages are marked lang="ar" and dir="rtl", and that numbers, phone numbers and Latin brand names keep their own direction inside the sentence.
4. Structured data that describes the real entity
Organization, WebSite, Service, FAQPage, Article and BreadcrumbList nodes are worth having when they are accurate. Validate them, keep one organisation @id across the site, and connect pages back to it instead of inventing a new company on every page.
If several businesses share your name, a disambiguating description and consistent profiles elsewhere help search engines keep the entities apart. No amount of markup fixes an empty or contradictory profile.
5. Core Web Vitals and the Arabic layer
Measure loading, interaction and layout stability on a mid-range phone, not only on your laptop. Compress and resize images, avoid loading fonts you do not use, and keep third-party scripts to the ones that earn their place.
Arabic web fonts are often heavier: subset them, limit the weights, and test how the page looks while the font is still loading. A layout that jumps when Arabic text arrives fails the stability metric for real users.
- robots.txt reviewed line by line
- Sitemap lists live URLs with alternates
- Self-referencing absolute canonicals
- hreflang pairs plus x-default
- One host, permanent redirect
- Structured data validated
- Core Web Vitals measured on a phone
- Arabic fonts subset and tested
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