This post is part of a series of articles on how to setup a Jekyll blog :
- Part 1: Setup up a jekyll blog using github pages and disqus comments
- Part 2: Add social sharing buttons with Jekyll
- Part 3: SEO for your Jekyll blog
Part 3: SEO
There are some simple things you can do to improve the SEO of your blog, here is the list of changes I made to the clean blog template :
1) Do not systematically include the blog name in the title tag
source : 5 Common SEO Mistakes with Web Page Titles
The clean blog template include the blog name in every post title, which is bad :
<title>{% if page.title %}{{ page.title }} - {{ site.title }}{% else %}{{ site.title }}{% endif %}</title>2) Use a specific meta description for each page of the blog
source : Meta Description Tag - Learn SEO
The clean blog template include the blog description on post page, you should use a specific description for each post :
<meta name="description" content="{{ site.description }}">3) Use the meta rel = author for each blog page
source: How to Implement the Rel=”Author” Tag – A Step by Step Guide
Link the page to your google+ profil :
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/+vincentdaubry"/>4) Generate a sitemap for your blog
A sitemap provides search engine crawler informations about your website structure and pages it should index.
You can easily generate one by adding the jekyll-sitemap gem to your _config.xml, just follow these instructions
5) Add a robots.txt file
A robots.txt file provides informations to crawlers about pages you want to exclude from indexing. You should also specify the path to your sitemap.
Add a similar file to the root of your project :
# www.robotstxt.org/
# www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449
User-agent: *
Sitemap: {{ site.url }}/sitemap.xmlThat’s it ! Do you see other improvements we can make to a Jekyll blog SEO ?
Code for this blog can be found here : vdaubry.github.io