Ghost is built to help content creators focus on creating amazing things, so one key to this is the SEO tools built into each post and page, allowing you to simply focus on filling in a couple places in one window and move along to the next content piece.
Ghost Main Content Key Areas
There are a few key parts to the simple Ghost SEO that can help speed up your process when adding in your search engine optimization when prepping to publish.
Title
The title is used for the meta heading if you don't choose to provide a custom option. The viewable title within most SERPs (Google, Bing, etc) is 60 characters so when possible try to keep this succinct and aligned to the content.
Otherwise, you can expand on this title and make it longer and then just update the Meta Data section below to be at 60 characters or less if a long title would help a visitor to the content.
Featured Image
This is the image you set at the top of any post or page you are planning to publish, what displays on your homepage, tag page, author page, or other custom theme layout.
This image will be the default one used for the image for the SERPs and should be something that highly ties to the content, for maximum SEO value it should be unique to your site.
If you target search traffic then you may consider a set minimum width of 1200 pixels which is required for the large image size on Google Discover, a way websites can get huge volumes of traffic should you be featured.
Ghost Sidebar Settings Key Areas
Now that you set everything inside the post you need to look at everything within the sidebar which is how you can tweak and dial in the SEO settings for any content to better showcase material when presented in a search engine.
Each of these sections has a roll in a completely generated piece of content and should have some care and attention paid to them to maximize the value you place into each post or page.
Post URL
This is where you set what the actual url will be for your post, this will default to the title the first time you enter one but most SEOs will say you should set it to the keyword your post is targeting.
One thing a shorter URL would help with is if someone has to manually type due to not being in an email link or showing as a search result. This is why some core post or pages should be short and to the point like (about), (contact), and similar.
There have been studies that show shorter urls tend to rank higher, this is somewhat a logical fallacy as the SEOs make shorter URLs so the "studies" really show the skill within proper SEO of a piece of content and how proper SEO can help something rank better.
Excerpt
This is the text that shows when a card is shown on the homepage, tags page, author page, or other theme custom layouts that involve cards. This should help add context to the title and to convinve the visitor to click and interact with the content.
Code Injection
This ability to add code specifically to the header or footer of each individual post allows you to specifically add anything you need on a by url basis. Things like if you are interested in counting something specific or need specific CSS for a post alone and shouldnt be loaded sitewide.
Meta Data
This section is where you provide what search engines to present to their audiences in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This provides a simple render window to also show you the information and how it could be presented when indexed and available in the SERP.
- Meta Title - The title of the post/page provided in the SERP, display room is typically limited to around 60 characters followed by an ellipsis if you make it longer.
- Meta Description - The description of the post/page provided in the SERP, display room is typically limited to around 150-160 characters followed by an ellipsis if you make it longer.
- Canonical URL - How you can tell a search engine like Google that a page is the best representative of a group of duplicate pages on your site if you write on a common topic repeatedly.
X Card
This area allows you to tailor everything for your audience in X, previously Twitter. This can be helpful if you know a style of image works better or title and description phrasing needs to be altered for people when the post is shared there.
Facebook Card
This area allows you to tailor everything for your audience in Facebook. This can be helpful if you know a style of image works better or title and description phrasing needs to be altered for people when the post is shared there.
