The SEO Playbook for content sites
What the SEO Playbook is
The SEO Playbook is a practical specification for any blog or content site. For every page type it lists the on-page elements that must be in place, an example value for each, and a short note on how to implement it. It also includes ready-to-copy structured data and the CMS fields that feed each page.
It is written to be handed straight to a developer or a no-code tool with minimal changes. The examples use a neutral brand and example.com, so you can adapt it to any project without renaming anything. It is split into two parts: the SEO elements for each page, and the CMS setup behind them.
What every page needs
Ten global rules apply to every URL: HTTPS everywhere, a self-referencing canonical tag, robots set to index and follow, an automatically generated sitemap submitted to Search Console, a robots.txt that lets crawlers in, a favicon and web manifest, Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data, alt text on every image, and internal links between related pages.
On top of that, the playbook covers seven page types: the home page, the About page, category pages, articles, the authors listing, author profiles and tag pages. Each gets one H1, a title of 50 to 60 characters, a meta description of 150 to 160 characters and an Open Graph image of 1200 by 630 pixels, plus the schema type that fits it.
Where the CMS comes in
Every field in the CMS maps to a meta tag or part of the page, so no extra logic is needed. The title becomes the H1 and the title tag, the intro becomes the meta description, and the cover image becomes the social image. Optional SEO fields override these, and fall back to sensible defaults when they are empty. Structured data is generated from the same fields.
The playbook also explains the difference between categories and tags. A post has one category and can have many tags, tag pages with fewer than three articles are set to noindex, and a tag slug must never match a category slug. Slugs are generated from titles with accents removed. The full playbook has the field tables, copyable JSON-LD and a pre-publish checklist.
