SEO, Meta Tags, and Absolute URLs – Number Go Favored Direction

As mentioned elsewhere, this website uses Hugo with the PaperMod theme. Although I have not put any significant amount of effort into making it so this website is indexed by search engines, I have put a small amount of effort. This documents what I have done.

Meta Tags

If you are interested in making your website more easily accessed by search engines, it’s important that the website has a description meta tag. In Hugo, you can do this by adding the “description” property.

If you are using a toml configuration file, this should be as simple as adding the following to the params section

[params]
  description = "Insert description here"

If you are using a yaml configuration file, instead make the following change:

params:
  description: "Insert description here"

Absolute URLs

While setting up a staging website, I thought it would be great to set the Hugo baseURL to ““. This allows the browser to use relative paths, instead of absolute paths, avoiding needing to handle the baseURL for different websites. This, unfortunately, is bad for SEO. Search engines use absolute URLs to crawl websites.

Other Suggestions

Of note, PageSpeed Insights does more than just analyze page speed, it makes basic SEO suggestions.