Technical SEO for Developers

~25 min · SEO

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Primary Source

Google Search Central — Developer Documentation

The authoritative source for crawling, indexing, and ranking. Read the Crawling & Indexing section first. Read →

Technical SEO: Developer-Owned

SEO has two sides: content (what you say) and technical (how Google finds and reads you). Developers own the technical side — and it has major ranking impact.

💡

A site with great content can rank poorly because of: broken sitemap, missing canonical tags, slow load time, JavaScript rendering that blocks indexing, or no structured data. All code problems you can fix.

robots.txt

# Serve at: /robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /dashboard/
Sitemap: https://yourapp.com/sitemap.xml

⚠️

robots.txt is not a security measure — it's publicly readable. Only use it to guide crawlers, never to hide private data.

Sitemaps

<!-- /sitemap.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://yourapp.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-06-01</lastmod>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://yourapp.com/blog/my-post/</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-05-01</lastmod>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Canonical URLs

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourapp.com/blog/my-post/" />

<!-- Prevents duplicate content from:
     - HTTP vs HTTPS
     - www vs non-www
     - trailing slash vs none
     - ?utm_source= parameters -->

Structured Data (JSON-LD)

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "How to Deploy Node.js to AWS",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Alice" },
  "datePublished": "2025-06-01",
  "url": "https://yourapp.com/blog/deploy-nodejs-aws"
}
</script>

Enables rich results in search (breadcrumbs, FAQs, star ratings). Test with Google's Rich Results Test.

Essential Meta Tags

<title>Deploy Node.js to AWS — YourApp Blog</title>
<meta name="description" content="Step-by-step guide to deploying..." />
<meta property="og:title" content="Deploy Node.js to AWS" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yourapp.com/og.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yourapp.com/blog/deploy-nodejs-aws" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />

Check Your Understanding

1. Your React SPA renders all content via JavaScript. Google indexes it as blank. The fix?

2. Your blog post is accessible at /blog/post and /blog/post/ (trailing slash). What problem does this cause?

3. Where should JSON-LD structured data go?