Internal and external searches. From WordPress to Jekyll 8

Internal and external searches

Continuing With our blog setup, we are going to focus on make it easier for our readers to find our content

RSS feed, internal and external searches

RSS feed

Although social networks caused this technology to lose many users, it still has its followers.  Basically it allows you to follow the updates of a blog without having to access the website.

By default, Jekyll generates its own feed and stores it in the site's root folder. But, we can use an external service simply by quoting the link after the item path under the feed heading.

Under this same heading we can find the option to remove the feed icon from both the header and the bottom of the page. We will simply have to change from false to true in hide.

Internal search engines

When we talk about search engines we are referring not only to the search within the site but also to our site appearing in search engines.

To allow searching within the site, we modify the code in config.yml as follows.
search: true
search_full_content: true

We can choose between three search options

  • Mon.
  • Algolia.
  • Google CustomSearch.

Mon

It is the option implemented by default and does not require any additional configuration.

Algol

Algolia is a much more powerful search engine than Lunr. It has a free plan and two payment options. To use it, you have to make modifications in another file that we will talk about in a later article.

The data that we have to complete in config.yml are the following:

search_provider: algolia
And the following data that we obtain when registering on the site
Algolia:
application_id: # The application ID provided by the service
index_name: # The name of the search index
search_only_api_key: # The assigned API KEY
We also have the option of showing readers which search engine we are using.
powered_by: # true (default), false
Remember to remove the numeral.
We start the indexing with:
ALGOLIA_API_KEY = your_admin_api_key bundle exec jekyll algoli

Google Customer Search

To use Google as our search engine we have to do the following;

  1. We go to this page and click on New search engine.
  2. We fill in the name of the site and choose the language. Click on Create.
  3. It shows us the search engine data, copies and pastes the id into a file to have it at hand.
  4. Click on Control Panel.
  5. In Look and feel we select Result only as layout and Minimalist as theme.
  6. We finish by pressing Save and get code.

We paste the id in the next section of config.yml
Google:
search_engine_id: Put the search engine id here
You can also activate the instant search option by setting the instant_search parameter to true.

Search engine optimization

At this point in the game, we all know that the best way to get good search engine locations is by paying for advertising. But, if for budget reasons that is out of the question, we can follow some tips to optimize our site in a make them more search engine friendly. One of the ways is by verifying that we are responsible.

Verification is the way to guarantee to search engines that we have the right to see the data that is generated from the searches that lead to our site

This step has to be done when you are going to upload the site to the server because it is necessary for each search engine to do the verification procedure.

In other words, you will have to have some posts written before completing this part of the config.yml file. We will see this in later articles.
Minimal Mistakes, the theme we are working with, is compatible with the following search engines.

Google Search Console

Verification can be done for both a domain and a specific address. In the first case it is required to be able to modify the DNS configuration, but in that case there is no need to make changes in config.yml. The other option is in URL Prefix choose the HTML Tag option
We will see a piece of code. We are only interested in the series of letters and numbers that are after content. We copy them between quotes in
google_site_verification:

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing also offers the option to edit DNS and adds the option to import a sitemap from Google Search Console, neither of which do we need to touch config.yml. Except that the option is called HTML Meta Tag, the procedure is the same.


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