EducAItion

SEO action plan — www.educaition.today

SEO action plan — www.educaition.today

Audit date: 25 August 2026. Based on the live site (v0.6.6) and this repo.

What is already in good shape

The technical foundation is solid. The site uses jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-sitemap and jekyll-feed: every page gets a canonical URL, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, and JSON-LD structured data. A robots.txt with a sitemap reference and a complete sitemap.xml (63 URLs) are served correctly. The apex domain educaition.today 301-redirects to www, permalinks are clean (/2026/08/slug/), post pages get a meta description from the first paragraph automatically, and the site is fast, mobile-friendly static HTML. Nothing blocks crawling.

Priority 1 — Get indexed (do this first)

The site appears not to be in Google’s index yet (site:educaition.today returns nothing). The domain went live around 20 August, so this is expected — but it will not fix itself quickly for a brand-new domain.

  1. Register the site in Google Search Console (google.com/webmasters). Use a “Domain” property, verified via a DNS TXT record at your registrar. Then submit https://www.educaition.today/sitemap.xml and use “URL inspection → Request indexing” on the homepage and the key pages (/filter/, /digest/, /faq/, /over/).
  2. Register in Bing Webmaster Tools too — it feeds DuckDuckGo and Ecosia (popular in education), and you can import the property from Search Console in one click.
  3. Check back in Search Console after ~1 week for coverage errors.

Priority 2 — Quick on-page fixes in this repo (an hour of work)

  1. Homepage title. It currently renders as “Home EducAItion” — the single most important title on the site carries no keywords. In index.html, change title: Home to something like title: "AI en onderwijs in Vlaanderen — nieuws, onderzoek en beleid".
  2. Set a proper locale. og:locale renders as nl; add locale: nl_BE to _config.yml (jekyll-seo-tag picks it up).
  3. Add a default social image. Posts without an image (and all overview pages) have no og:image. Add a branded 1200×630 image to assets/img/ and set it as the seo-tag default (defaults → image) in _config.yml. Also add logo: and social: (name + links) to _config.yml so the JSON-LD Organization block is complete.
  4. Keep CHANGELOG out of the sitemap. https://www.educaition.today/CHANGELOG/ is listed; add sitemap: false front matter to it (or move it out of the published site).
  5. Post descriptions. None of the 54 posts have a description: front matter field; the auto-excerpt works well because your first paragraphs are strong, so this is optional — but for the digests (long-form, your most valuable pages) a hand-written description is worth it.

Priority 3 — Structural improvements (the biggest ranking lever on-site)

  1. Create static, crawlable tag/theme pages. The /filter/ page is entirely JavaScript-driven, so search engines see no landing page for themes like “AI-geletterdheid”, “Evaluatie & fraude” or levels like “Secundair onderwijs”. These are exactly the phrases teachers search for. Generate one static page per thema and per niveau (a simple loop over _data/tags.yml, one small HTML file per tag with the filtered post list — no plugin needed, GitHub Pages-safe), link them from the badges, and let the sitemap pick them up. This is the highest-impact content change you can make.
  2. FAQ rich results. faq.html has ~18 Q&A blocks; add FAQPage JSON-LD so Google can show it as a rich result.
  3. Internal linking. Posts currently link out to the source but rarely to each other. Add a “related articles” block on post pages (match on shared thema tags) and link from digest entries to the underlying posts and back. This spreads authority and keeps crawlers moving.
  4. Self-host key images. Thumbnails and og:image values hotlink to VRT, Veto, VAIA etc. — these can disappear or block hotlinking, and they’re invisible to Google Images as your content. At minimum rely on the default social image (point 6); ideally store an own copy for evergreen pages. Also give thumbnails a meaningful alt (currently alt="").

Priority 4 — Authority building (the real driver for a new domain)

  1. Earn backlinks from the Flemish education ecosystem. A new domain ranks on links, not on-page polish. Concrete targets: a KlasCement listing (websites section), Mediawijs, Schoolmakers, VAIA, onderwijs-nieuwsbrieven, and the organisations you cover — when you summarise their work, tell them; many will link back. One good link from klascement.net is worth more than everything in Priority 2.
  2. Publish the weekly digest on LinkedIn with a canonical link back to the site — your network is the fastest distribution channel you have, and consistent traffic signals help.
  3. Monitor. Search Console (coverage + queries) weekly; Cloudflare Analytics is already installed for traffic.

One thing to keep an eye on

During the audit, www.educaition.today/ briefly served an older build (v0.5.3, old homepage copy) while other pages served v0.6.6 — most likely GitHub Pages CDN cache from last night’s deploy. If you see stale content after future deploys, verify with a hard refresh and check the Pages build status.

Sources: live checks of https://www.educaition.today/ (homepage, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, post pages) and the repo files _config.yml, _layouts/default.html, _layouts/post.html, index.html, filter.html, faq.html, _posts/ (54 files, 0 with description:).