Optimize Ghost for SEO - Page Title

The Ghost blogging platform doesn’t currently have plugins (and maybe will always be that way). Something I was missing after migration is the SEO optimization for any blog post… so I started making it by myself.

Overview

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First step: change page title to respect SEO “rules”. The title of any post page should also have the blog name suffix:

<title>Post title | Blog name<title>

To accomplish this in Ghost you can proceed into two different ways:

Method 1: Theme Only

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Personalise the default.hbs file in your theme

<title>{{meta_title}} | {{@blog.title}}</title>

Method 2: Core Modification

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Change the Ghost core to provide the meta_title variable with the correct value, allowing you to change theme without losing SEO customisations. Edit the file core/server/helpers/index.js around the line 395. Here’s the complete code of my meta_title function:

coreHelpers.meta_title = function (options) {
    /*jslint unparam:true*/
    var title = "",
        blog;

    if (_.isString(this.relativeUrl)) {
        if (!this.relativeUrl || this.relativeUrl === '/' || this.relativeUrl === '' || this.relativeUrl.match(/\/page/)) {
            blog = config.theme();
            title = blog.title;
        } else if (this.post) {
            **blog = config.theme();
            title = this.post.title + ' | ' + blog.title;**
        }
    }

    return filters.doFilter('meta_title', title).then(function (title) {
        title = title || "";
        return new hbs.handlebars.SafeString(title.trim());
    });
};

In bold the code I changed.

Restart your NodeJS server and enjoy your first SEO optimization.