SEO Validation

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Summary

Introduce an SEO validation layer to the Health Engine that continuously verifies every publicly accessible page meets a minimum level of search engine optimisation.

The goal is not to replace SEO platforms, but to integrate with established SEO standards and validation tools to provide continuous health assessment.

Objectives

• Validate every page exposed by the sitemap.
• Detect SEO regressions during deployment.
• Produce a structured SEO health report.
• Record validation results using OpenTelemetry.
• Identify pages that require optimisation.
• Integrate with existing SEO validation tools where possible instead of implementing custom SEO rules.

Validation

Examples include:

• Missing page titles.
• Missing or duplicate meta descriptions.
• Missing canonical URLs.
• Invalid heading hierarchy.
• Missing structured data.
• Broken internal links.
• Missing image alternative text.
• Indexability issues.
• Sitemap consistency.
• robots.txt validation.

Observability

Record SEO validation as part of the Health Engine, including:

• Pages validated.
• SEO score.
• Number of issues detected.
• Severity of findings.
• Validation timestamp.

Future Enhancements

• Continuous SEO monitoring.
• Structured data validation.
• Core Web Vitals integration.
• Search Console integration.
• Automatic SEO remediation suggestions.
• Configurable SEO policies.

[digitalrisedorset]

Implementation Notes

The Health Engine is not intended to implement SEO validation itself.

Instead, it should orchestrate existing SEO validation capabilities through a pluggable architecture.

The table below captures candidate integrations that should be investigated as the project evolves.

Validation	Candidate Systems	Notes
SEO audit	Lighthouse	Validate overall SEO health and best practices.
Search indexing	Google Search Console	Verify indexing status and search coverage.
Structured data	Google Rich Results Test	Validate schema.org structured data.
HTML validation	W3C Validator	Detect invalid markup that may affect SEO.
Sitemap validation	XML Sitemap protocol	Validate sitemap structure and availability.
robots.txt validation	robots.txt standard	Verify crawler directives.
Canonical URLs	Lighthouse	Detect canonical URL issues.
Metadata validation	Lighthouse	Validate titles, descriptions and headings.
Broken links	HTTP crawler	Detect broken internal and external links.

This table is intentionally non-prescriptive and should evolve as additional SEO providers, standards and validation capabilities are identified.