📑 Ultimate SEO Guide for Vibe Coding

Master React + TypeScript SEO with Production-Ready Code Examples

📈 Get Your Vibe Coded Apps Ranked/Indexed on Search Engines

This comprehensive guide provides practical, production-ready blueprints for maximizing organic visibility in React + TypeScript applications. From SSR strategies to Core Web Vitals optimization, get drop-in code patterns you can implement today.

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📋 Table of Contents

🎯 Core SEO Decisions That Move the Needle
🏗️ Making React Indexable
🔗 URL Architecture & Routing
📊 Route-Level Meta Management
🏷️ Structured Data & JSON-LD
🤖 Crawling, Indexing & Sitemaps
📄 Pagination & Infinite Scroll
⚡ Core Web Vitals Optimization
🌍 Internationalization
📱 Social Sharing Previews
🚀 Deployment & Headers
🔧 CI/CD SEO Guardrails
📝 Quick Start Checklist
⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Solutions
🏢 CMS Integration Strategies
🛠️ Framework Recommendations
📚 Additional Resources

🎯 Core SEO Decisions That Move the Needle

React-specific decisions that maximize organic visibility

1. 🏗️ Render Content as HTML

Prefer SSR/SSG or pre-rendering so bots and users see real HTML fast
Google explicitly recommends SSR/static rendering over "dynamic rendering" user-agent workarounds
If you must ship a pure SPA, ensure every indexable view has a unique URL that returns HTML

2. 🔗 Use Crawlable Links and Stable URLs

Google finds pages via <a href="…"> — it doesn't click buttons to load more results
Google ignores # fragments for unique content
Use real <a> links and real URLs

3. 📄 Canonicalization, Pagination & Parameters

Set the canonical for each page (absolute URL)
Don't force every paginated URL to canonicalize to page 1
For sorted/filtered variants, either prevent indexing or keep them crawl-eligible but non-indexable

4. 🏷️ Structured Data (JSON-LD)

Use JSON-LD and follow Google's structured-data guidelines
Support Organization/LocalBusiness, Product/Service, FAQ, Breadcrumbs
If you generate it with JS, that's supported—just test with Rich Results

5. ⚡ Core Web Vitals Are Ranking-Relevant

As of March 12, 2024, INP replaced FID as a Core Web Vital
Monitor LCP, CLS, INP and optimize images, fonts, JS, and caching

6. 🤖 Crawl Controls & Sitemaps

Use meta robots / X-Robots-Tag to control indexing
robots.txt cannot "noindex" a page
Keep JS/CSS unblocked
Supply an XML sitemap (50k URLs / 50 MB max per file)

🏗️ Making React Indexable

A. 🌟 Best-Case: SSR/SSG (React 18 Streaming)

If your platform allows Node on the edge/origin, React 18's renderToPipeableStream reduces time-to-HTML and improves LCP. Combine with route-level meta and HTTP caching.

B. 📱 Pure SPA (Vite + React Router) with Pre-render

If SSR is truly impossible, pre-render public routes at build time:

✅ Each page has a static HTML shell (title/description/LD+JSON)
✅ Navigation uses real <a href> links (no button-driven routing)

🔗 URL Architecture & Routing

🎯 Essential Rules

❌ No hash routing — bots ignore # for uniqueness. Use History API URLs
✅ Every indexable view must have a unique, shareable URL
✅ Choose one hostname (e.g., https://www.example.com), enforce HTTPS + 301s
✅ Normalize trailing slashes/case; produce a single canonical per page
✅ Use absolute canonicals

📊 Route-Level Meta Management

🛠️ Robust React + TypeScript Pattern

Use React Router v6 "data routers" with a handle.seo contract and react-helmet-async to generate unique metadata per route.

// src/seo/SEO.tsx
import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet-async';

export type SEOConfig = {
  title?: string;
  description?: string;
  canonical?: string;           // absolute or site-relative
  robots?: string;              // e.g., "index,follow" or "noindex"
  og?: { type?: string; image?: string | null };
  twitter?: { card?: 'summary' | 'summary_large_image'; site?: string; creator?: string };
  schema?: Record<string, unknown> | Record<string, unknown>[];
};

const SITE_URL = 'https://www.example.com';

export function SEO(cfg: SEOConfig) {
  const {
    title, description, robots = 'index,follow', og = {}, twitter = {}, schema
  } = cfg;
  const canonicalUrl =
    cfg.canonical?.startsWith('http')
      ? cfg.canonical
      : `${SITE_URL}${cfg.canonical || (typeof window !== 'undefined' ? window.location.pathname : '/')}`;

  return (
    <Helmet prioritizeSeoTags>
      {title && <title>{title}</title>}
      {description && <meta name="description" content={description} />}
      <link rel="canonical" href={canonicalUrl} />
      <meta name="robots" content={robots} />

      {/* Open Graph / Twitter */}
      <meta property="og:type" content={og.type ?? 'website'} />
      <meta property="og:url" content={canonicalUrl} />
      {title && <meta property="og:title" content={title} />}
      {description && <meta property="og:description" content={description} />}
      {og.image && <meta property="og:image" content={og.image} />}
      <meta name="twitter:card" content={twitter.card ?? 'summary_large_image'} />
      {twitter.site && <meta name="twitter:site" content={twitter.site} />}
      {twitter.creator && <meta name="twitter:creator" content={twitter.creator} />}

      {/* JSON-LD */}
      {schema && (Array.isArray(schema) ? schema : [schema]).map((obj, i) => (
        <script key={i} type="application/ld+json"
                dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(obj) }} />
      ))}
    </Helmet>
  );
}

🔧 Router Configuration Example

// src/routes.tsx (React Router v6 data router)
import { createBrowserRouter, useMatches, Outlet } from 'react-router-dom';
import type { SEOConfig } from './seo/SEO';
import { SEO } from './seo/SEO';

type SEOHandle = { seo: SEOConfig | ((data: any) => SEOConfig) };

function RootLayout() {
  const matches = useMatches() as Array<{ handle?: SEOHandle; data?: unknown }>;
  const last = matches.at(-1);
  const cfg = typeof last?.handle?.seo === 'function'
    ? last?.handle?.seo(last?.data)
    : last?.handle?.seo;

  return (
    <>
      {cfg && <SEO {...cfg} />}
      <Outlet />
    </>
  );
}

// Example page-specific configs
export const router = createBrowserRouter([
  {
    path: '/',
    element: <RootLayout />,
    children: [
      {
        index: true,
        element: <HomePage />,
        handle: { 
          seo: { 
            title: 'Acme Co. — Enterprise Widgets', 
            description: 'High-reliability widgets.', 
            canonical: '/' 
          } 
        }
      },
      {
        path: '/services',
        element: <ServicesPage />,
        handle: { 
          seo: { 
            title: 'Services | Acme Co.', 
            description: 'Advisory & implementation.', 
            canonical: '/services' 
          } 
        }
      },
      {
        path: '/products/:slug',
        loader: productLoader,
        element: <ProductPage />,
        handle: {
          seo: (data: Awaited<ReturnType<typeof productLoader>>) => ({
            title: `${data.product.name} | Acme Co.`,
            description: data.product.seoDescription,
            canonical: `/products/${data.product.slug}`,
            og: { type: 'product', image: data.product.ogImage ?? null },
            schema: productJsonLd(data.product)
          })
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]);

💡 Why react-helmet-async? It's the maintained, SSR-safe way to manage <head> in React apps. GitHub Repository

🏷️ Structured Data & JSON-LD

🎯 Typed, Reusable JSON-LD Helpers

Use TypeScript helpers so each page can attach the right schema object(s). Validate with the Rich Results Test.

// src/seo/schema.ts
export type Thing = Record<string, unknown>;

export const orgJsonLd = (name: string, url: string, logo: string): Thing => ({
  '@context': 'https://schema.org',
  '@type': 'Organization',
  name, url, logo
});

export const localBusinessJsonLd = (opts: {
  name: string; url: string; phone?: string;
  address: { 
    streetAddress: string; 
    addressLocality: string; 
    addressRegion: string; 
    postalCode: string; 
    addressCountry: string 
  };
}): Thing => ({
  '@context': 'https://schema.org',
  '@type': 'LocalBusiness',
  ...opts
});

export const breadcrumbJsonLd = (items: Array<{ name: string; url: string }>): Thing => ({
  '@context': 'https://schema.org',
  '@type': 'BreadcrumbList',
  itemListElement: items.map((it, i) => ({
    '@type': 'ListItem', 
    position: i + 1, 
    name: it.name, 
    item: it.url
  }))
});

export const productJsonLd = (p: {
  name: string; description: string; url: string; image: string;
  sku?: string; brand?: string;
  offers?: { price: number; priceCurrency: string; availability: string; url: string };
}): Thing => ({
  '@context': 'https://schema.org',
  '@type': 'Product',
  ...p
});

🏢 Local businesses should also consider the LocalBusiness guide (hours, phone, geo). If you generate JSON-LD with JavaScript, that's supported—just test it.

🤖 Crawling, Indexing & Sitemaps

🎛️ The Right Levers

✅ Use robots meta or X-Robots-Tag to control indexing (noindex, max-image-preview, etc.)
❌ Do not try to "noindex" in robots.txt; that's unsupported
✅ Keep JS/CSS accessible — don't block them in robots.txt
✅ Sitemaps: one file ≤ 50,000 URLs or 50 MB (uncompressed)

📄 Example robots.txt

User-agent: *
Allow: /

# Keep assets crawlable (don't disallow CSS/JS)
# Disallow private or thin areas
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /*?*sort=
Disallow: /*?*filter=

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

🗺️ TypeScript Sitemap Generator

// scripts/generate-sitemap.ts
import { createWriteStream } from 'node:fs';
import { SitemapStream, streamToPromise } from 'sitemap';
import fetch from 'node-fetch';

const HOST = 'https://www.example.com';

async function main() {
  const sm = new SitemapStream({ hostname: HOST });
  sm.pipe(createWriteStream('public/sitemap.xml'));

  // Static pages
  ['/', '/about', '/services', '/contact'].forEach(url =>
    sm.write({ url, changefreq: 'monthly', priority: 0.7 })
  );

  // Dynamic (e.g., from CMS/API)
  const products = await fetch(`${HOST}/api/public/products`).then(r => r.json());
  products.forEach((p: any) => 
    sm.write({ url: `/products/${p.slug}`, lastmod: p.updatedAt })
  );

  sm.end();
  await streamToPromise(sm);
  console.log('sitemap.xml written');
}

main().catch(err => { console.error(err); process.exit(1); });

⚠️ Status codes matter: Unknown routes must return 404, retired pages can be 410, and avoid "soft-404s" (HTML saying "not found" with HTTP 200).

📄 Pagination & Infinite Scroll

🔗 What Google Expects

✅ Use real links (<a href="?page=2">Next</a>) so crawlers can discover subsequent pages
✅ Give each page a unique URL (e.g., ?page=n) and its own canonical
❌ Don't canonical all pages to page 1
ℹ️ Google no longer uses rel="prev/next" for indexing—focus on links, canonicals, and sitemaps

⚡ Core Web Vitals Optimization

🎯 What Changed: INP Replaced FID (March 12, 2024)

Target passing performance at the 75th percentile for LCP, CLS, INP.

🖼️ Images (Often Your Biggest LCP Lever)

<!-- In <head> -->
<link rel="preload" as="image" href="/images/hero.avif"
      imagesrcset="/images/hero.avif 1x, /images/hero@2x.avif 2x" 
      imagesizes="100vw">

<!-- In body -->
<img src="/images/hero.avif" alt="Acme industrial widgets"
     width="1280" height="720" 
     fetchpriority="high" 
     decoding="async">

Best Practices:

✅ Serve responsive sources via srcset/sizes
✅ Prefer AVIF / WebP fallbacks
✅ Preload the hero image and/or use fetchpriority="high"
✅ Lazy-load below-the-fold images (loading="lazy")
❌ Not the LCP image

🔤 Fonts

<link rel="preload" href="/fonts/Inter-var.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>
<style>
  @font-face {
    font-family: 'InterVar';
    src: url('/fonts/Inter-var.woff2') format('woff2');
    font-weight: 100 900; 
    font-display: optional;
  }
  body { 
    font-family: 'InterVar', system-ui, -apple-system, Segoe UI, Roboto, sans-serif; 
  }
</style>

Best Practices:

✅ Self-host WOFF2, subset fonts
✅ Use font-display: optional + <link rel="preload" as="font">
✅ Avoid FOIT/FOUT and CLS

📊 Measure in the Field (RUM)

// src/metrics/web-vitals.ts
import { onLCP, onCLS, onINP, type Metric } from 'web-vitals';

const send = (m: Metric) =>
  navigator.sendBeacon('/vitals', JSON.stringify({ 
    name: m.name, 
    value: m.value, 
    id: m.id, 
    path: location.pathname 
  }));

onLCP(send); 
onCLS(send); 
onINP(send);

📈 Google recommends collecting Web Vitals in the field; the web-vitals library is the easiest way to do that.

🌍 Internationalization

🗺️ Multi-Language Setup

✅ Use separate URLs per language/region (e.g., /en/, /fr/)
✅ Add hreflang cross-links between alternates
✅ Include a self-reference on each page
❌ Don't rely on lang alone

📱 Social Sharing Previews

🎨 Open Graph & Twitter Cards

Add page-specific og:title, og:description, og:image for high CTR, and Twitter card meta. Use the Open Graph protocol as the baseline. (The SEO component above handles this.)

🚀 Deployment & Headers

🔧 Clean Signals

Redirects: Permanent site-wide 301 from non-canonical host to canonical, HTTP→HTTPS, trailing slash policy
Caching:
- Hashed static assets → Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable
- HTML → no-store or max-age=0, must-revalidate
Security: HSTS (helps consistency on HTTPS)
Favicons & Site Names: Follow Google's favicon and site-name guidelines

🔧 CI/CD SEO Guardrails

🛡️ Prevent SEO Regression

✅ Lighthouse CI budget in CI (fail builds if LCP/CLS/INP regress)
✅ ESLint with jsx-a11y plugin (accessibility helps semantics)
✅ Link checker (broken internal links)
✅ Tests that read route configs and assert each public page has title/description/canonical and JSON-LD

📝 Quick Start Checklist

🚀 Day 1 Implementation

Pick rendering path: SSR/SSG if possible; otherwise pre-render public routes
Implement the SEO component + handle.seo per route
Add Organization (and LocalBusiness/Product/etc.) JSON-LD to relevant pages
Ship sitemap.xml, robots.txt (with sitemap directive), and correct status codes/404s
Optimize LCP (hero image preload), fonts, and reduce JS
Start collecting Web Vitals with web-vitals
If multilingual, wire hreflang

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Solutions

🚨 Avoid These Mistakes

❌ SPA 404s returning HTTP 200 due to "catch-all" rewrites
- ✅ Configure your host to serve real 404.html with status 404
❌ Faceted URLs exploding crawl
- ✅ Keep pages crawlable for users but noindex values you don't want in the index
❌ Dynamic rendering for bots only
- ✅ Use SSR/SSG or pre-render for everyone instead

🏢 CMS Integration Strategies

A. 🎯 WordPress (Root) + React App (Subdomain)

What: Keep all public, indexable content on WordPress at example.com. Put the authenticated product at app.example.com.

Why it works for SEO:

WordPress gives non-devs fast publishing + mature SEO plugins
Google treats subdomains as valid site partitions
You can noindex app/login/etc. using meta robots or X-Robots-Tag header

B. 🔄 Same Domain, Different Origins: Reverse Proxy

What: Keep marketing at example.com and mount the React app at example.com/app via reverse proxy/rewrites.

Why: Preserves one hostname and consolidates signals under the root.

C. 🎭 Headless WordPress + React Front End

What: WordPress only for content editing/API; public site is built with a React framework that pre-renders pages.

Benefits: HTML is ready on first byte (great for crawl & Core Web Vitals) + you retain WordPress editorial workflow.

🛠️ Framework Recommendations

🏆 SEO-Forward React Frameworks

Framework	Why it's Strong for SEO	Signature Features
Next.js (App Router)	SSR/SSG by default, Server Components + streaming ship HTML early	`generateMetadata`, file-based robots/sitemap, ISR
React Router v7	SSR + pre-rendering for static URLs, progressive enhancement	Route-level `<Meta/>` + prerender config
TanStack Start	Full-document SSR, streaming, Selective SSR per route	Per-route `ssr` controls, streaming SSR
Astro (with React)	Islands architecture → static HTML by default, hydrate only interactive components	React integration, islands (`client:*` directives)
Gatsby	Mature SSG with DSG + optional SSR, huge source plugin ecosystem	DSG/SSR rendering options, CMS integrations

🎯 Choosing the Right Path

Strong editorial + blogs/docs? → Astro or Headless WP + Next/Gatsby
One React codebase for everything? → Next.js App Router
Prefer edge runtime + progressive enhancement? → React Router (v7) or Next on Edge
Want to dial SSR per route? → TanStack Start
E-commerce on Shopify? → Hydrogen

📚 Additional Resources

🔗 Key Google Documentation

JavaScript SEO Basics - Google's official JS SEO guidance
Dynamic Rendering as a Workaround - Why to prefer SSR/static
Pagination Best Practices - Crawlable links, unique URLs
Robots Meta Tag - Control indexing properly
Sitemaps Guide - Build and submit sitemaps

🚀 Performance Resources

INP Became a Core Web Vital - March 12, 2024 update
Optimize LCP - Preload critical images
Optimize Web Fonts - Preload + font-display: optional
Measure Web Vitals - Field measurement best practices

🏗️ Technical Implementation

Open Graph Protocol - Social preview reference
Structured Data Guidelines - JSON-LD best practices
React Helmet Async - SSR-safe head management

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Made with ❤️ by Mark Fulton

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