Search Engine and Social Media Optimization

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a moving target which is often misunderstood. Rise of social media has changed the traditional SEO techniques. Changes in search algorithms has made several SEO techniques obsolete.

Elegant does its best to leverage all available search and social media tags to give your site higher ranking in search results and optimize it for sharing via social media.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Inspired by the post “What is the New SEO? Pubcon 2013 Takeaways”, I looked into the tags that social media sites use. They can be broadly divided into two categories, Open Graph protocol and Twitter Cards.

Open Graph protocol

Elegant uses following tags,

1. og:url is set to article URL
2. og:type is set to “article”
3. og:title is set to article tile and optional subtitle
4. og:site_name is set to SITENAME from your Pelican configuration
5. og:description is set to article summary
6. og:article:author is set to article author
7. og:article:published_time is set to article date
8. og:image is an optional tag. It is set to value of featured_image

featured_image should be the complete URL of an image. This image is displayed with the article link on most social sites.

Elegant looks for it first in the article metadata, here is metadata for an example reST formatted file.

:featured_image: http://oncrashreboot.com/images/article-1-image.jpg

Then it looks for FEATURED_IMAGE in Pelican configuration. If it finds neither, og:image is not used.

If you want to use og:image tag then make sure you define featured_image in your article metadata. You should also define FEATURED_IMAGE in your Pelican configuration to be used as a generic image in case an article does not have featured_image defined.

Twitter Cards

Elegant uses following tags,

1. twitter:card is set to “summary”
2. twitter:title is set to article title and optional subtitle
3. twitter:creator is set to TWITTER_USERNAME if defined in Pelican configuration
4. twitter:description is set to article summary
5. twitter:image is set to featured_image. The featured_image discussion above is also applicable in this case

Please note you need to be approved by Twitter before you can start using Twitter Cards.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Elegant puts tags and category of your article in keywords tag <meta name="keywords".

You can add your own keywords by defining keywords in article metadata.

SITE_DESCRIPTION and article summary is used in description tag <meta name="description".

Your AUTHOR name is used in copyright tag <meta name="copyright".

Like this post? Share on: Twitter ❄ Facebook ❄ Email

Talha Mansoor is the creator and lead developer of Elegant theme.