SEO for Independent Publishers
Why Ghost is great for SEO
Ghost generates clean, semantic HTML. No plugin bloat, no render-blocking scripts, no database-heavy page loads. Google rewards fast, well-structured sites — and Ghost delivers both by default.
The fundamentals
- Title tags — Ghost auto-generates from your post title, or set a custom meta title
- Meta descriptions — Use the SEO panel in the post editor
- URL slugs — Ghost creates clean slugs automatically, but you can customize them
- Structured data — Ghost outputs JSON-LD schema automatically (Article, Person, Organization)
Content that ranks
For course creators, the best SEO strategy is answering questions your students are already searching for. Each lesson in your free course is a potential search landing page.
The content flywheel
- Research questions in your niche (Google autocomplete, forums, Reddit)
- Write a comprehensive lesson that answers the question
- Make it part of a free course (builds email list)
- Convert free readers to paid members (revenue)
- Repeat
Technical SEO checklist
- Ghost generates sitemaps automatically (
/sitemap.xml) - Canonical URLs prevent duplicate content issues
- Ghost handles redirects when you change slugs
- Robots.txt is configured by default