Writing your first post
The minimum front matter a post needs, and the shape that earns search traffic.
What does a post actually need? Three lines of front matter and a body.
That is the whole requirement: title, description, and pub_date. Everything else is optional,
and this file is the proof. Compare it with hello-world.md, which shows every field available.
The shape that gets found
Search engines and AI assistants reward the same structure, and it is not complicated:
- Make the title the question someone types. Not a clever phrase. The question.
- Answer it in the first eighty words. Give a number, a name, or a yes with its condition. This is the passage an assistant quotes when it cites you, so make it able to stand alone.
- Then go deep, under headings that are almost questions themselves. Each section should make sense pulled out of context, because that is how it will be retrieved.
- Prefer specifics to adjectives. Numbers, examples, and named things beat "powerful" and "seamless" every time.
- Say what you are unsure about. A stated range reads as more trustworthy than false precision, and sources that qualify their claims get cited more, not less.
The part most people skip
Write about the thing where you are genuinely the best available source. Anyone can restate a popular tutorial, and the search results already have forty of them. Nobody else can explain how your product decides something, what it actually costs, or what you learned shipping it.
That is the post worth writing first.