SEO that doesn't fight the front-end

Open any SEO article from 2018 and it will tell you to put your most important content above the fold, to use H2 tags everywhere, and to avoid JavaScript-rendered pages because Google "might not see them."

This is wrong now. Google sees JavaScript-rendered pages fine. The H2 advice was always cargo cult. And "above the fold" is a print metaphor that survives because nobody has noticed it died.

The real work for modern SEO is three things. Structured data that mirrors your information architecture, every entity type on your site needs a JSON-LD block, generated at build time, validated against schema.org. Server rendering for every indexable page, because crawlers still prefer it and so do humans on slow networks. And Core Web Vitals tuned at the framework level, not patched in after a Lighthouse complaint.

We do this on every Morlabs build. Schema, SSR, CWV. The rest is content.