Search-friendly page foundations

SEO Basics

Rendering and crawlability

• Primary content, title, meta tags, canonical and links must be in the server-rendered or prerendered HTML. Check with view-source or curl, not DevTools.
• Do not hide content behind client-only rendering, clicks or infinite scroll without paginated URLs.
• Links are real <a href> elements with crawlable URLs; no javascript: links or onclick navigation.
• Clean, stable, lowercase, hyphenated URLs. Redirect changed URLs with 301s; avoid chains.
• Correct status codes: 404 or 410 for missing pages, never 200 soft-404s.

Titles and descriptions

• Unique title per page, about 50–60 characters, main topic first, brand last.
• Unique meta description per page, about 140–160 characters, written for a searcher.
• Generate both from page data through the repo's head/metadata mechanism (Next metadata, Nuxt useHead, react-helmet, an SEO plugin). Never one hardcoded value site-wide.

Headings and content

• Exactly one h1 matching the page topic; h2–h6 in order.
• Descriptive link text instead of click here; alt text on meaningful images.
• Avoid duplicate pages; consolidate or canonicalize them.

Canonical and indexing

• Absolute, self-referencing canonical on every indexable page; filtered, tracking-parameter and print variants point to the main URL.
• noindex for internal search results, carts, account pages and staging. Never ship a site-wide noindex or Disallow: / to production by accident.
• Canonicals, sitemap and internal links agree on one URL form (https, host, trailing slash).

sitemap.xml and robots.txt

• The sitemap lists only canonical, indexable, 200 URLs with accurate lastmod. Generate it from routes or content; split above 50,000 URLs.
• robots.txt references the sitemap and blocks only what must not be crawled. Do not block CSS or JS needed for rendering. robots.txt does not deindex; noindex does.

Structured data

• JSON-LD in <script type="application/ld+json">, matching visible content: Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Article, Product, FAQPage, LocalBusiness as fits.
• Include required properties; validate with the Rich Results Test or a schema validator.

Social previews

• og:title, og:description, og:image (absolute URL, about 1200x630), og:url, og:type, and twitter:card summary_large_image.

Multilingual

• hreflang for every language version, reciprocal, including self and x-default, with absolute URLs, consistent with canonicals.
• Each language has its own URL; never switch language only by cookie or IP.

Speed and mobile

• Responsive viewport meta, readable font sizes, spaced tap targets.
• Keep pages fast: good LCP and CLS help ranking and keep visitors.

Before you finish

• Each changed page has a unique title, meta description and one h1 in the server HTML.
• Canonicals, sitemap and internal links agree.
• No accidental noindex or robots.txt block.
• Structured data valid and matching the page.
• Open Graph tags present with an absolute image URL.
• hreflang reciprocal if the site is multilingual.