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Search engines

What Fieldnotes tells search engines and link previews about your site and you, without anything visible.

On every page#

• a title (the page’s, then the site’s) and a description (description, else the summary, else params.description);
• a canonical address, so copies of a page don’t compete with it;
• Open Graph and Twitter card tags, for previews when a link is shared (Hugo’s own templates), with an image from the page’s images (Front matter);
• the page’s RSS feed and your favicon.

Hugo also writes a sitemap.xml listing every page, and with enableRobotsTXT = true a robots.txt.

About you#

Name yourself under params.author:

[params.author]
  name = "Jane Doe"
  alternateName = "J. Doe"
  jobTitle = "PhD student"
  image = "images/photo.jpg"
  [params.author.affiliation]
    name = "University of Example"
    url = "https://example.org/university"

From this, Fieldnotes writes structured data (JSON-LD, the format Google reads): the home page is your profile page, about you as a person, with your social profiles from socialIcons as “same as” links (except email and RSS); every post is an article by you. This helps a search for your name find your site, and connects it with your profiles.

Google’s rule is that structured data must match what visitors see, which it does here: the profiles are the icons on your home page. You can check the result with Schema.org’s validator (opens in a new tab) or Google’s Rich Results Test (opens in a new tab).

Getting found#

A new site takes days to weeks to appear in search results. Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) shows whether Google has found it; submitting https://your-site/sitemap.xml there speeds it up.