Advanced SEO features

Ideas
1

I can’t be the first person to think about this can I?

How is it that there’s no Yoast plugin for Ghost? It’s like the standard SEO tool for Wordpress by a lot.

I haven’t been able to find anything, am I missing something?

2
  • ghost doesn’t have plugin support right now
  • SEO is built into the platform so you don’t need a plugin in the first place
1 Like
3

Very interresting! (new user here, bear with me!)

How do you mean ‘SEO is built into the platform’?

Is there some way to replicate the functionality of Yoast in Ghost?

4

No worries, happy to help!

What functionality from yoast are you looking for specifically? A lot of the SEO functionality in ghost is either auto-generated or is configured in a specific area (i.e settings page or post settings menu)

5

The seo keyword optimization checklist functionality would be awesome

6

Really? In the RankBrain era of Google, keywords are way less important than in the past - it feels like it would be unnecessary cruft in Ghost at this point.

1 Like
7

Hey Matthew,

As @vikaspotluri123 mentioned, Ghost does have full SEO functionality, and much of it happens in the background without any extra effort, plugins or downloads :)

In the editor you’ll be able to see where you can manually override meta data for the search engines as well as Twitter and Facebook. Behind the scenes, Ghost also provides detailed structured data (Schema.org), XML sitemaps, canonical tags, permalinks and semantic markup. Plus you get the SEO benefits of having a site with high performance, and there’s the option to enable AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – if you’re into that.

IMO, one of the downsides of using Yoast’s KW optimisation suggestions is that is encourages us to write meta data for machines instead of humans – which isn’t always the best approach in the changing landscape of SEO. That said, I understand that it does have some benefits. But given the pace at which Google change the “rules”, it’s not something that’s on our radar at the moment.

1 Like
8

Very interesting! Thanks for the follow up, good reminders, and I agree, I like to write for humans first, robots second :slight_smile:

3 Likes
11

Some Yoast features should definitely be added into Ghost, however I don’t think that a CMS is the right place for SEO recommendations or keyword research.

As it currently stands, I think it’s an overstatement to say Ghost has “full” SEO functionality.

To claim full SEO functionality you’d really need to have a lot more features available to and configurable in the Admin UI, especially those in the Google search dev guides and references.

Here’s my wishlist (as an SEO) that I wish Ghost had:

  • A more feature complete set of Schema entitles (not just Articles/Publisher/images) including but not limited to:

    • Breadcrumb (frontend, and associated schema)
    • Video (associated schema for card embed)
    • Organisation Schema (local business/organisation/corporate)
    • SiteNavigationElement
    • AboutPage
    • Future Schema.org functionality would be make sense to be associated with custom-post, custom-field or custom-card content types (if these become a feature)
    • For example:
      • Book
      • Event
      • FAQ page
      • How-to
      • Job Posting
      • Product
      • Q&A Page
      • Sitelinks searchbox (if site search implemented)
      • Review snippet
      • Multiple LocalBusiness instances (eg page for each location or one page with all locations)
    • Brownie points: a fully configurable and API interactable Schema engine to enable consistent and sitewide implementation of the full suite of search engine compatible schema

  • Nofollow at both page level and link level (for paid links & crawl prioritisation, and comments if this feature gets added)

  • Noindex implementation

    • page/post level
    • rules based:
      • by custom-content type (if this is created)
      • by page type (author, blog, page, tag etc)

  • Sitemap (more than just auto generation)

    • Page level sitemap control
    • Sitewide sitemap rules
      • by custom-content type (if this is created)
      • by page type (author, blog, page, tag etc)
    • Google Indexing API for newly published posts
    • Sitemap update ping to search engines

  • Configurable i18n hreflang attribute injection

  • Image EXIF data (option to keep when optimising image size)

  • Page Title & Meta desc

    • pixel counts for input fields (not just char counts)
    • sitewide field pattern configurability by page type (post, page, tag, author etc)
10 Likes