🪴 Pranav Mandhare

Notes for writing SEO & UX friendly blogs

2 min read

This is a page created to test and understand behaviour of all frontmatter properties. I am using a static site generator called Quartz which is built on Obsidian. When I write and deploy obsidian markdown, it goes through a set of transformers that convert it into HTML and render Static Pages while preserving Obsidian functionalities like Graph Views, Callouts, Tags, etc.

Create SEO Friendly URLs

Some learnings,

  1. The properties like permalink or slug do not work into defining the url
  2. The Obsidian note title is solely considering for url construction, which means I have to ensure the obsidian note title is url friendly
  3. The frontmatter title should be the actual natural language title of the page, this can be changed while keeping the obsidian page url (title) canonical

Repairing URLs for Old Notes

Since I have all my old notes written considering Obsidian Title as natural language, this has led to irregular urls that are indexed by Search Engine. Any attempt on changing the names of my notes will result in new page creation which will give 404 on search clicks. Hence I cannot easily repair my urls now.

Styled Syntax for Code

This functionality was already available as a transformer Plugin in the cart - however it was not default, hence I had to enable it in quartz config.

Not if I declare the name of the language in the code block, it gets the relevant highlights. Example below:

 
plugins: {
	transformers: [
		Plugin.SyntaxHighlighting(),
	],
}

Record Last Modified Date without impact on ordering or RSS

I also wanted more flexibility in recording created and modified dates. When I add last-modified date as a frontmatter - this results in the last modified being considered as the date to sort the Folder and Tag lists.

Need to figure out a way to record modified dates while sorting by created date itself.

Resources

Quartz - Static Site Generator Obsidian - Graph based Note Taking Client

Graph View