SEO and sharing

What Izar does for you

• Titles and descriptions. Each page gets a title (“Page title | Site title”) and a description, from title and description in its front matter, falling back to _config.yml. The jekyll-seo-tag plugin writes them, along with the canonical address.
• Social sharing. Open Graph and Twitter tags with a sharing image. Every page uses /assets/img/og.png unless it sets its own image:. A project or note with an image that has a path shares that picture instead. See Works.
• Who you are. The home page tells search engines about you as a Person, or a ProfessionalService if you set schema_type in _config.yml. It includes your name, role, email, address and profile links from the izar: settings. For a Person the role is sent as the job title, and for a studio as its description.
• Your notes. Each note is marked up as a BlogPosting, with its title, description, date and image.
• Your projects. Each project page is marked up as a CreativeWork.
• A sitemap at /sitemap.xml, from the jekyll-sitemap plugin.
• A feed of your notes at /feed.xml, linked from every page. See Notes.
• Pages kept out of search. The thank-you page, the 404 page and the /blocks/ catalogue are marked noindex and left out of the sitemap.
• Clean HTML. One main heading per page, headings in order, real links, and the whole page’s CSS inline, which helps speed.

To hide any other page from search, add these two lines to its front matter:

noindex: true
sitemap: false

Before you launch

1. Set url in _config.yml to your real address, with no slash at the end. Sharing tags, the sitemap, the feed and the Web3Forms redirect all need it.
2. Write a title and description in index.md that say what you do and where, such as “Freelance front-end developer in Berlin”. Every page needs its own description.
3. Set role, email, address and schema_type under izar:.
4. Replace assets/img/og.png with your own 1200 × 630 picture. The stand-in is a plain dark card.
5. Check that every note has a description, and every project has a description and an image.
6. Add your site to Google Search Console and submit https://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml.

Checking it

• Paste your address into PageSpeed Insights for speed, accessibility and SEO scores. Izar is built to score 100.
• The Rich Results Test shows the structured data search engines see.
• To check social sharing, paste your address into a post on LinkedIn or Bluesky before publishing it.

The /blocks/ page

/blocks/ is the section catalogue. It’s in your copy so you can copy snippets while you build, and search engines are told to ignore it. If you don’t want it public, delete blocks.html.