Content structure in Ghost

Every CMS has its own quirks, and Ghost is no exception.

On this platform we will find some features we are used to seeing, but there will also be other options that we won’t see here.

Pages, posts and tags

On the platform we can initially publish content as pages and posts. There are also some pages that are created automatically, such as the Author page or the website’s Sitemap.xml.

Tag settings

To organise pages and articles, we have Tags, but we don’t have the classic categories we are used to working with.

Personally, I prefer categories to tags as such, but this is not a limitation when it comes to building our strategy and type of SEO. It is simply a change we need to adapt to in order to rank our blog content.

The main drawback of Tags is that every URL contains the /tag/ folder, which many SEOs may not look kindly on, but this can be changed by editing the YAML file.

To do this, we need to go to our Ghost admin panel, under Settings, in the Labs option, where the last option lets us download our YAML file, update it and upload it again.

In the file we have downloaded, we will see a line like this:

routes:

collections:
  /:
    permalink: /{slug}/
    template: index

taxonomies:
  tag: /tag/{slug}/
  author: /author/{slug}/

We need to change tag: /tag/{slug}/ to tag: /{slug}/, and this way we get clean tags without /tag/ in the URL.

Once the changes are made, we save the file and upload it again from the same place in our admin panel where we downloaded it.

It is important to bear in mind that a tag URL cannot be the same as an article URL.

The robots.txt file

Setting up the robots.txt file is fairly simple.

To publish our robots.txt file on our Ghost website, all we have to do is create the file in the root of our Ghost theme and upload it.

To do so, we go to Settings, then Design, download the active theme and add the robots.txt file to it. Then we upload the theme from the same place we downloaded it, using the Upload a theme option, and that’s it.

The change may take a couple of hours to become visible because of caching, as it is sometimes slow to update.

Ecommerce in Ghost

It is not an option I have personal experience with, but it does have extensions and integrations with ecommerce features.

I should remind or tell those of you who aren’t familiar with it that Ghost is a very blog-oriented platform, which can work quite well for creating simple product pages (if you don’t sell many products) or landing pages for lead generation.

Even so, there is an integration with Snipcart, which lets you turn Ghost into an online shopping platform.

Have you tried Ghost yet? What did you think? Do you find a lot missing? Is there something specific you can’t find and would like to do? Let me know in the comments =)