SEO Guide for Blog Posts

To improve the discoverability of your blog posts and optimize them for search engines, follow these guidelines when creating new content:

1. Front Matter SEO Fields

Add these fields to your post front matter:

---
title: Your Descriptive Post Title (55-60 characters ideal)
description: A compelling meta description summarizing your post (150-160 characters ideal)
date: 2023-05-15
updated: 2023-05-16 # Optional: only use if you make significant updates
featured_image: /img/your-featured-image.webp # Optional: for social sharing
tags:
  - primary-keyword
  - secondary-keyword
  - etc
---

2. Content Structure Guidelines

• Use one H1 heading per page (typically your post title)
• Structure content with H2, H3, etc. headings in a logical hierarchy
• Keep paragraphs relatively short (3-5 sentences ideal)
• Include your primary keyword in:
  • Title
  • First 100 words
  • At least one heading
  • Image alt text (when relevant)
  • URL slug

3. Internal Linking Best Practices

• Link to relevant older posts when appropriate
• Use descriptive anchor text (not "click here" or "read more")
• Link to category/tag pages for broader topics

4. Image Optimization

• Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names (e.g., japanese-brutalist-design.webp)
• Add alt text describing the image content
• Compress images before uploading

5. Technical SEO Automatically Applied

These are handled automatically by the site's templates:

• Structured data (JSON-LD)
• Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata
• Canonical URLs
• XML sitemap inclusion
• RSS feed inclusion

6. Post-Publication

• Share on social media
• Consider updating older popular posts with links to your new content