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SEO for Static Sites: Beyond the Basics

by Your Name · · 3 min read · Updated:

Static sites have a natural SEO advantage: fast load times, clean HTML, and no JavaScript-dependent rendering. But there's more you can do. This starter includes several SEO features that go beyond the basics.

Structured data with JSON-LD

Every page includes structured data using JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data). This helps search engines understand the content without guessing:

Homepage: WebSite, WebPage, Person, and BreadcrumbList schemas tell search engines about the site, its author, and navigation structure.

Blog posts: BlogPosting with datePublished, dateModified, author, headline, and image properties. This powers rich snippets in search results — the date, author name, and thumbnail that appear below a result.

Author pages: Person and ProfilePage schemas link the author's social profiles and establish identity.

All structured data is generated from the same data files you edit (site.json, users.json, person.json), so it stays in sync automatically.

Open Graph and Twitter Cards

Every page emits Open Graph meta tags for social sharing:

<meta property="og:title" content="..." />
<meta property="og:description" content="..." />
<meta property="og:image" content="..." />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

Blog posts also include article:published_time, article:modified_time, and article:author. Twitter Card tags ensure large image previews when shared on X.

Sitemaps that reflect reality

The sitemap is generated dynamically from all pages. What makes it useful:

  • Pages with eleventyExcludeFromCollections or unlisted: true are excluded
  • lastmod uses the computed modified date — the newer of the Git history date and the global site.modified setting
  • Dates are in ISO 8601 format as required by the spec

RSS that's human-readable

The RSS feed includes an XSL stylesheet that renders it as a readable page in browsers. When someone visits /feed.xml directly, they see a styled page explaining what RSS is and how to subscribe — not raw XML.

llms.txt for AI agents

The starter includes llms.txt, a proposed standard for helping AI language models discover and read site content. It provides:

  • A site description
  • Links to all blog posts as Markdown files
  • Links to all pages
  • A full-text version of the entire site

This is the equivalent of robots.txt for AI — a structured way to say "here's my content, and here's how to read it."

Content negotiation

On Apache servers, the .htaccess file enables content negotiation. When a client sends Accept: text/markdown, blog posts are served as raw Markdown instead of HTML. This is useful for:

  • AI agents that prefer Markdown over HTML
  • Tools that want to fetch the source content
  • RSS readers that process Markdown natively

SEO for static sites isn't about tricks. It's about giving machines the same clear structure you give humans — and doing it at build time so it's always correct.