SEO Strategies for Jekyll Websites

In today’s increasingly digital world, search engine rankings continue to become more and more important for attracting new readers to blogs and other web-based content. It’s still important to produce high-quality content, but high-quality content is no longer enough to bring in new traffic.

The formula is simple; producing informative and helpful content on top of solid search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to grow and maintain an online presence. Even the best content will get buried in the search engines if it’s hidden behind poor SEO practices.

Enter Jekyll. Jekyll is a semi-minimal static site generator that strikes a nice balance between simplicity and capability. The semi-minimalistic nature of Jekyll allows teams and individuals to build the functionality they need and leave behind all of the bloat, slower performance, and security vulnerabilities that come with traditional CMS’s like WordPress.

SEO is not included in Jekyll by default, but it’s not too hard to add some basic SEO practices into a Jekyll content workflow. Everybody has their own opinions of the most important SEO practices, but the following list of strategies will cover the biggest items.

Strategy 1 - Install the jekyll-seo-tag Plugin

Perhaps the most unanimously accepted Jekyll SEO strategy is to use the jekyll-seo-tag plugin. It’s easy to use and takes care of several of the most important SEO items by itself. It’s even accepted by GitHub Pages so it won’t break your automatic builds. I’d recommend configuring at least the title, description, and permalink of every post, but the plugin offers many other configuration options that may be valuable. Check out the plugin documentation for more details.

Strategy 2 - Generate a Sitemap with the jekyll-sitemap Plugin

Every search engine uses web crawlers to search the web for new content so it can be indexed for future searches. A sitemap makes it very easy for the crawler to find all of the important content on your blog or website so that it can be appropriately indexed.

Strategy 3 - Add Google Analytics to the Website

If it’s not already installed on the website, consider adding Google Analytics.

If Google Analytics is added to a brand new website, it won’t be long before Google indexes your site for the first time. This is good! Getting indexed will allow the process of organic growth to begin, although it may take awhile to build up sufficient content for the growth to come.

If Google Analytics is added to an existing website, this is still good! Most of the content is probably already indexed, but looking at the behavior of the readers on the website will provide valuable insights for making decisions. Certain topics and posts will be more popular than others - are there any patterns that could be used to tailor future content to the audience? Use the analytics to better serve the primary audience of the content.

Strategy 4 - Optimize Performance

Research has shown that long load times have an adverse effect on readers navigating to a new web page. Long load times mean lower satisfaction.

Search engines have accounted for that by ranking slow websites lower than fast websites. Different search engines and tools use different metrics for this, but a common metric is known as the time to first meaningful paint (FMP).

The general idea behind FMP is to measure how long it takes for a visitor to see a satisfactory result. This means the content is loaded and rendered to the screen in the way it’s intended to be consumed.

Big images and long transitions will have a negative impact on FMP. Because it is so dependent on the specific page and content being rendered, it makes the most sense to run new content through a tool like Google Lighthouse. That brings us to the last strategy…

Strategy 5 - Scan Content with a Tool Like Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a flexible open-source tool for scanning the quality of webpages. It gives scores for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Each of these categories will then have quantifiable and actionable metrics that contribute to the score given.

Scanning content through Google Lighthouse gives so much insight into the specific details that affect search engine rankings and visitor satisfaction. Finding and fixing all of the low scores will dramatically improve the overall quality of the content.

Conclusion

There are so many ways to optimize web content for search engine rankings and it only gets more complex with every passing day. There are a million other items we could discuss to improve SEO, but these give a solid foundation for basics to implement (strategies 1-4) as well as a strategy for ongoing improvement (strategy 5).

There’s no such thing as “perfect SEO”, but there is such a thing as “bad SEO”. Don’t have bad SEO.

Additional Resources

  • [A Beginner’s Guide to SEO optimization in a Jekyll static website Juliette Sinibardy](https://jsinibardy.com/optimize-seo-jekyll)
  • [How I improved my Jekyll SEO Waldek Mastykarz](https://blog.mastykarz.nl/improve-jekyll-seo/)
  • [10 Must do Jekyll SEO optimizations Webjeda](https://blog.webjeda.com/optimize-jekyll-seo/)
  • Google Lighthouse Docs

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