Website SEO

Website SEO

Search visibility — robots, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data. Curated from the Website Specification — SEO (CC BY 4.0).

Required

• Use correct HTTP redirects: 301/308 for permanent moves, 302/307 for temporary; never chain more than necessary.
• Every page needs an explicit, correct indexing policy — default index, follow on public pages, noindex / X-Robots-Tag on staging, admin, or thin content.
• Headings form a nested outline. Never skip levels; never use headings for visual styling alone.

Recommended

• robots.txt at the site root (RFC 9309).
• XML sitemap listing canonical URLs; use a sitemap index above 50,000 URLs.
• Keep URLs lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive, and shallow — treat them as a public API.
• Server-side render primary content and metadata so it is in the initial HTML response.
• Internal linking to signal topical importance.
• JSON-LD structured data using the schema.org vocabulary.
• Breadcrumbs, marked up as BreadcrumbList JSON-LD.

Avoid

• Soft 404s — a "not found" page that returns 200 OK.

Example JSON-LD

<script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Title",
    "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Name" }
  }
</script>

Full item list and rationale: https://specification.website/checklist/