Document 07 of 14 · docs/SEO.md

Search and sharing, the rules per page

What makes the site "easily found by search engines and share pages", stated as rules the generator enforces, so no template ships without them. studio-src/build.mjs writes all of it from meta.json; a page a person hand-edits is a page that drifts.

1. URLs

• Template: /templates/<category>/<slug>/. Customizer: …/customize/ (noindex). Free file: …/free/<slug>-letter.pdf.
• Category: /templates/<category>/. Index of everything: /templates/.
• Month pages: /templates/calendars/january-2027-calendar/ and so on, twelve per dated calendar, each a full template page whose sheet is that month and whose free file is that one month.
• Help: /help/<slug>/. Legal: /terms/, /privacy/, /refunds/, /license/. Order: /order/ (noindex).
• Trailing slashes everywhere (vercel.json enforces it). Canonical host www. Every self-reference, canonical, og:url, sitemap entry and JSON-LD url pins https://www.artisanpdfstudio.com/….

2. Head, per template page

• <title>: "{Title} | Artisan PDF Studio", under 60 characters; the title in meta.json already carries the search phrase ("Weekly Planner Template").
• <meta name="description">: the promise sentence plus "Free plain version, or made yours in Letter and A4." Under 155 characters.
• Canonical to itself. og:type product, og:title, og:description, og:url, og:image (the 1200 by 630 card), og:image:width/height/alt, og:site_name.
• Product Rich Pin fields, so Pinterest reads price and availability: product:price:amount (the tier), product:price:currency (USD), og:availability instock. Validate once with Pinterest's Rich Pin validator after the first template ships; it is per domain.
• twitter:card summary_large_image, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image, twitter:image:alt.
• Favicon set and theme-color from the shell. <link rel="preload"> for the display face.
• Cache-bust share images with ?v=YYYYMMDD and keep the version in one constant in build.mjs.

3. Structured data, per template page (three blocks)

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Weekly Planner Template", "image": ["https://www.artisanpdfstudio.com/og/weekly-planner.png"],
  "description": "…the promise…", "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Artisan PDF Studio" },
  "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "url": "https://www.artisanpdfstudio.com/templates/planners/weekly-planner/",
    "priceCurrency": "USD", "price": "7.00", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [
  { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Templates", "item": "https://www.artisanpdfstudio.com/templates/" },
  { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Planners & trackers", "item": "https://www.artisanpdfstudio.com/templates/planners/" },
  { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Weekly Planner Template" } ] }

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "…", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "…" } } ] }

Never an AggregateRating or Review block. There are no reviews, and a rating we did not earn is the kind of claim the Studio Standard forbids. Help pages carry Article. The homepage carries WebSite and Organization (name, url, logo). No HowTo anywhere; it does not fit.

4. Images that get shared

Every one is rendered from the real template by studio-src/shots.mjs; there is no other kind of image on the site.

• Preview: page one at 1200 px wide, webp with a png fallback, loading="lazy" except the hero, width and height attributes always, so nothing shifts.
• OG card: 1200 by 630, the sheet at a slight angle on the desk, the title in the display face, the price and "free plain version" in mono. One per template, category and help page.
• Pin: 1000 by 1500, the sheet upright, the title, the "free" flag. Rendered for every template and every month page. A Pinterest business account, one board per category, one pin per template on launch and one more when a template changes. Pinterest's pin description is the pin.description from meta.json, under 500 characters, phrase early.
• Alt text is the promise sentence, not the title repeated.

5. Internal linking, the spine

• Every template page links: its category, its family siblings (the planner set), three related in the same category, and the help article its print notes cite.
• Every category page links every template in it, newest first, plus the two neighbouring categories.
• The homepage links every category and the six newest templates.
• Month pages link their eleven siblings and the twelve-sheet set.
• Help pages link the templates they help with.
• Nothing is orphaned: the sweep counts inbound links per page and fails at fewer than three.

6. Sitemap, robots, Search Console

• sitemap.xml lists every indexable page with a real lastmod (the template's version bump date, not the build date). Regenerated by build.mjs.
• robots.txt allows everything except /order/ and /api/. The customizer is excluded by X-Robots-Tag and a meta tag both.
• Search Console by DNS TXT on Cloudflare (survives regeneration; a meta tag would not). Submit the sitemap at cutover. Judge nothing for eight weeks after that.
• GA4 with the host guard. Events worth having from day one: free download, customizer opened, buy clicked, purchase (from the success page), draft assist used. Those five are the funnel.

7. What the month pages are, and are not

Twelve real pages a year from one calendar source, each showing a genuinely different sheet with its own free file and its own phrase. That is programmatic in the only honest sense: every page has a reason to exist for the reader. What it is not: a page per colour theme, a page per paper size, or a page per "printable calendar for teachers" spin. One design, one page; variants live in the customizer.

8. Things that would look like SEO and are not done

• No thin "best X templates" listicles. Category pages with an honest 150 words are the hub.
• No keyword-stuffed H1s; the H1 is the template's name.
• No fake ratings, no fake counts of downloads, no "trusted by".
• No doorway pages for other countries until Phase 4, when an A4-first page for one market can be built properly.