Everything You Need to Know About Ghost and SEO

 

Ghost is one of the technologies that we recommend to small publishers. It's an excellent balance of being free and straightforward to use, yet having much modern technology that makes an excellent reading experience for your users. At an equivalent time, it offers out-of-the-box capabilities for monetization and reader revenue.

One thing that Ghost does particularly well by default, is SEO, or program Optimization. For those not familiar, 

SEO is all about ranking on search engines like Google and improving your SERP, or program Ranking Position.

SEO may be a complex art and science of its own that depends on tons on the content that you simply are producing. 

But aside from your content, there are technical considerations that you simply have to confirm your website is configured to optimize your SEO.

Ghost does many of those things automatically for you, but others take some fixing. We’ll take you through all of it step by step.

Here’s everything you would like to understand about SEO and Ghost.

SEO That Just Works in Ghost

Let’s start with the simplest things: SEO that Ghost does for you out of the box and just works on your website automatically.

XML Sitemaps

One of the foremost basic items you ought to do for your website to urge it to rank in search engines is to have a file that tells search engines what pages are on your site and at what URL they will be found.

Ghost automatically generates this sitemap for you - so there’s nothing else you would like to try to do.

Structured Data for Rich Text Results

Maybe you’ve noticed in Google how search results are no longer just an inventory of internet sites, but often have questions and answers or carousels of posts with images?

These are called Rich Text Results and are made possible by something called Structured Data. 

Essentially, this suggests that to be a Featured Result on an inquiry engine, you would like to supply the essential data of your post in a way that the program understands.

What this suggests practically, is that your post must have some code added thereto during a format called JSON-LD

Ghost adds all of this code to your blog posts automatically, so there’s nothing additional you would like to try to do.

Google AMP

Pages that are optimized for Google AMP serve streamlined content at no time speeds even for mobile devices without a robust connection. 

Not only does it often provide a far better experience for mobile users, but it's also a prerequisite for exposure in some Google featured search results.

Ghost by default supports Google AMP pages and generates them as a part of their default themes. 

If you're not employing a default Ghost theme, you ought to confirm that your theme provider supports Google AMP.

If you're building or modifying your theme on your own, you'll make changes to Ghost’s default AMP template by modifying the amp.hbs enter the basis of your theme directory.

URL Optimization

Finally, Ghost automatically generates URLs for you supported by the title of your post. So if the title of your post is “My Post”, the URL slug that Ghost generates for you'll be “my-post”.

This conforms to a number of the highest recommendations on URL optimization from SEO powerhouse Moz such as URLs easily readable by humans, separate words using hyphens, and using all small letter letters.

One thing to notice is that Moz recommends using short URLs to urge the utmost impact from keywords that you simply include in your URLs. 

By default, Ghost sticks to the present and can generate a two-word slug.

Keep this in mind if you've got long post titles in Ghost –

 you'll want to stay with the automatically shortened version otherwise you might want to feature a touch more context. (depending on how general or detailed keywords you would like to target)

Ghost SEO Features you ought to be Setting

The next category is SEO features that you simply should be taking advantage of in Ghost but the platform won’t do for you automatically. So you would like to form sure you're setting all of those yourself.

Meta Tags

First, let’s start with Meta tags. you'll find the choice to edit these under each blog post or page that you simply publish under “Metadata”.

If you don’t do anything, Ghost by default will use your post’s title and excerpt because of the Meta Title and outline specifically.

 But you ought to give these meta tags some extra thought because in the words of Google they provide users a “quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query.”

In other words, this is often your best chance to convince someone who finds your content through a Google search to click on your result. Ahref’s features a great guide to the way to create the right title tag that provides you some good ideas of the additional thought you would possibly want to place here.

You should monitor how your blog posts show up in Google’s search results regularly. Often, Google will prefer to show automatically generated Titles or Descriptions if Google doesn’t feel that yours was relevant enough to the keywords that were searched

For your most vital keywords, you ought to confirm that your Title and outline are exposed correctly - since the automatically generated ones aren't very user-friendly and can hurt your click-through rate.

Canonical URLs

Next, let’s check out Canonical URLs. Canonical URLs essentially tell Google which page to index within the event that it finds duplicates or similar content. 

This comes up if you're syndicating or cross-posting your content.

By default, Ghost will set the Canonical URL of a post thereto post’s URL. 

However, if you're re-posting content that has already been published elsewhere - say you probably did a guest post on a special site but want to re-post the content on your site - then you would like to link the Canonical URL to the URL where it had been originally published.

Social Media Cards

Customizing cards for Social Media is the next thing we should always believe. Now Ghost does tons of the legwork for us here – 

Ghost automatically generates the cardboard which will show up once we share one among our blog posts on Facebook or Twitter.

If you don’t make any changes here, 

Ghost will automatically take your Title and Excerpt, but this is often something you ought to spend a while optimizing. 

Shorter is best here, as you'll want to catch someone’s attention as they're scrolling through their Facebook or Twitter feed.

Image Alt Tags

Finally, all of your images should have an Alt tag added to them - not only since it's a best practice for accessibility, but because it's also an honest chance to urge during a few more keywords.

You can set this by getting to a picture in Ghost and clicking on the Alt button within the bottom right.

How to Disable Your RSS Feeds

The next topic may be a bit controversial but we’re getting to go there anyway. And that’s RSS feeds. 

Some people stand by them as a commitment to the way the online should work - allowing people to subscribe to their next blog posts via an XML data feed.

While there are others out there who claim that RSS feeds are obsolete and are only employed by spammers who want to tear off your content. 

And, when spammers take your content and repost it, you get penalized by Google for duplicate content.

We won’t wade too deep into the tradeoffs and who could also be right here, instead what’s important to understand is that Ghost generates RSS feeds by default for all of your blog posts.

If you favor disabling your RSS feeds, however, Ghost gives you that option.

You can do this in your routes.yaml file by adding the sector ‘rss: false’ to all or any of your collections.

Speed and Performance

Increasingly, speed is becoming a crucial neighborhood of SEO as Google recently made Page Speed a part of its ranking algorithm.

Ghost is certainly head and shoulders above WordPress when it involves speed since it's built on newer technology. (up to 19 times faster actually, Ghost claims) 

But you ought to still take a couple of additional steps to urge the simplest speed possible out of Ghost.

The first thing to believe is your hosting. Best to not perform here, as you'll want to settle on a service that gives a CDN or content delivery network.

A content delivery network essentially may be a service that makes caches of your content in local servers around the world that's then served to your readers counting on where they're located. (Ghost’s own GhostPro service may be a good option here)

Next, you'll want to believe your theme. All themes require some amount of assets to function - think fonts, graphics, icons, etc. 

If these aren't properly managed they will create bloat that slows you down. Take a while to gauge the speed of a topic before you plow ahead and buy or install it.

You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to try to do this: for instance, our free Newsletter theme scores a 98 / 100.

Conclusion

Ghost may be a powerful, free publishing platform that provides your website with tons of great SEO features right out of the box.

With the proper configuration, you'll make certain that your Ghost blog posts are going to be nabbing top Google rankings and driving many organic search traffic back to your website.

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