Better discoverability for GitHub Pages sites

Ensuring that your GitHub Pages site appears in search engines and is shareable via social media is now easier with the introduction of the Jekyll SEO Tag plugin.

By simply adding the {% raw %}{% seo %}{% endraw %} tag to your site’s template Jekyll will automatically add the appropriate search engine metadata to each page, including the page title, description, canonical URL, next and previous URLs for posts, and JSON-LD site and post metadata to help your site get properly indexed by search engines.

Additionally, the SEO tag plugin adds open graph and summary card metadata, ensuring properties like the title, description, and any featured images are displayed richly when your content is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks.

While you’ve always been able to add the various metadata tags yourself, the plugin provides a battle-tested template of crowdsourced best-practices, which along with the Jekyll sitemap plugin, will help your site appear in major search engines.

For more information, see using Jekyll SEO Tag on GitHub Pages.

Happy Search Engine Optimizing!

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.