SEO Bootstrap

SEO Bootstrap

Overview

Most solo founders ship a marketing site without a sitemap, without robots.txt, with no Open Graph image, and zero structured data. Google can crawl the site but doesn't know what it is. AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) skip it entirely because there's nothing structured to cite [1][2].

This skill ships the four files that move a site from "invisible" to "indexable" in one commit: sitemap.xml, robots.txt, a default 1200×630 OG image, and Organization + WebSite JSON-LD in the root layout.

Activation moment: "It opened a PR that fixed sitemap, robots, and schema in one commit."

When to Use

• New site just deployed, never had SEO touched
• Lighthouse SEO score < 100 with "Document doesn't have a meta description" or "no robots.txt"
• Site shows up in site:domain.com but no rich result, no favicon in SERP, no OG card on Twitter/iMessage
• Builder said "I just shipped, what's the bare minimum?"

Don't use for: sites that already have all four pieces (run auditing-technical-seo instead), or staging environments that should stay noindex.

Step 1 + 2 — Detect framework and audit current state

Run the detector. Do not eyeball this.

node scripts/detect-framework.js .          # human-readable report
node scripts/detect-framework.js . --json   # same facts as JSON

It reads package.json plus the folder shape, and returns the framework, the template directory to use, the canonical site URL (and where it came from), and a present/missing verdict for all four assets at framework-idiomatic paths. Exit 0 = framework detected, 1 = unknown, 2 = bad path.

Show the user the report table before writing anything.

The canonical site URL is a hard gate. The detector reports it from site: (astro.config.*), metadataBase (next.config.* / app/layout.*), or PUBLIC_SITE_URL (svelte.config.*). If it comes back null, ask the user once and do not generate until you have it — without it every sitemap and canonical URL renders relative and Google rejects the file.

If missing comes back empty, stop: the site is already bootstrapped. Route to auditing-technical-seo instead.

Detection lives in code, not in this table, so it is unit-tested against real project fixtures (fixtures/, test/detect-framework.test.js) and cannot drift from what the templates actually support.

Step 3 — Generate missing pieces

Use the framework templates in templates/{nextjs,astro,sveltekit}/ — the detector's templates field names the right one. Each directory has a README mapping template file to destination path. Rules:

• Only write files the audit flagged missing. Never overwrite.
• Substitute every REPLACE-WITH-* token before committing. A shipped REPLACE-WITH-CANONICAL-ORIGIN is worse than no sitemap.
• Wire imports: for Next, the metadata files are zero-config. For Astro, add @astrojs/sitemap to astro.config.* and run npm install. For SvelteKit, the +server.ts is auto-routed.
• JSON-LD goes in the root layout, not per-page at this stage. Per-page Article/Product schema is the next skill's job.
• Ship as one commit: feat(seo): bootstrap sitemap, robots, OG, and JSON-LD. Then open one PR.

Step 4 — Verify

After deploy (or npm run build && npm run preview):

curl -sI https://site.com/sitemap.xml | head -1   # expect 200
curl -s  https://site.com/robots.txt              # expect Sitemap: line
curl -sI https://site.com/og.png                  # expect 200, < 1MB

Then:

• Paste any page URL into Google's Rich Results Test [3] — confirm Organization + WebSite parse with zero errors.
• Run Lighthouse → SEO category → expect 100.
• Drop the URL into iMessage or Slack to eyeball the OG card.

Common Mistakes

• Sitemap includes private routes (/admin, /api, draft slugs). Filter explicitly in the generator.
• robots.txt blocks /_next/ or /assets/ — breaks rendering for Googlebot. Default-allow, only disallow /api/ and /admin/.
• OG image > 1MB or wrong dimensions. Google and Twitter both want 1200×630, < 1MB, JPG or PNG. The next/og ImageResponse template stays well under.
• @type: "Website" (capital W) instead of "WebSite". schema.org is case-sensitive. Validators silently drop the wrong one.
• Leaving noindex from a staging template. Search the codebase for noindex after generation.
• Forgetting metadataBase / site. Sitemap URLs will be /about instead of https://site.com/about — Google rejects.

Quick Reference

What next

After bootstrap merges:

1. auditing-technical-seo — deeper checks: canonical tags, hreflang, internal linking, Core Web Vitals.
2. setting-up-seo-measurement — verify Google Search Console, submit the sitemap, wire up GA4/Plausible.
3. finding-underserved-keywords — the growth-phase loop, after ~90 days of GSC data.

Sources

• Next.js sitemap metadata file
• Next.js robots metadata file
• Next.js opengraph-image metadata file
• @astrojs/sitemap docs
• SvelteKit routing — +server endpoints
• Google Search Central — Sitemaps overview
• Google Rich Results Test