kpumuk / meta-tags

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. — Read more

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Fixed bug when title is set through Array, and :lowercase is true

kpumuk (author)

Sat Nov 21 09:07:37 -0800 2009

commit 8f0df45909569fc6265c09a185c05a445b1efa48
tree 2d720719f3b4cd2f59b4aa73206b2b5822b348c1
parent f50979e6bf7bdfb77485e56b01312bacb9969462

meta-tags /

name	age	history message
.gitignore	Sat Nov 21 02:46:36 -0800 2009	Moved documentation to Yard [kpumuk]
MIT-LICENSE	Wed Oct 08 07:55:58 -0700 2008	Fixed plugin author in MIT-LICENSE [kpumuk]
README.rdoc	Sat Nov 21 02:46:55 -0800 2009	Added specs for canonical URL generator [kpumuk]
Rakefile	Sat Nov 21 08:44:27 -0800 2009	Tuned Yard documentation of helpers [kpumuk]
VERSION.yml	Sat Nov 21 02:47:13 -0800 2009	Version bump to 1.1.1 [kpumuk]
init.rb	Thu Nov 05 03:00:29 -0800 2009	Gemified plugin [kpumuk]
lib/	Sat Nov 21 09:07:37 -0800 2009	Fixed bug when title is set through Array, and ... [kpumuk]
meta-tags.gemspec	Sat Nov 21 02:47:20 -0800 2009	Regenerated gemspec for version 1.1.1 [kpumuk]
spec/	Sat Nov 21 09:07:37 -0800 2009	Fixed bug when title is set through Array, and ... [kpumuk]

README.rdoc

MetaTags

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for Ruby on Rails applications.

Installation

There are two options when approaching meta-tags installation:

using the gem (recommended)
install as a Rails plugin

To install as a gem, add this to your environment.rb:

  config.gem 'meta-tags', :lib => 'meta_tags', :source => 'http://gemcutter.org'

And then run the command:

  sudo rake gems:install

To install meta-tags as a Rails plugin use this:

  script/plugin install git://github.com/kpumuk/meta-tags.git

Titles

Page titles are very important for Search engines. The titles in the browser are displayed in the title bar. The search engines would look at the this title bar to determine what the page is all about.

  <title>Some Page Title</title>
  <title>Page Title | Site Title</title>

Recommended title tag length: up to 70 characters, 10 words.

Description

Description tags are called meta tags as they are not displayed by the browsers as that of titles. But these descriptions may be displayed by some search engines. They are used to describe the contents of a page in 2 or 3 sentences.

  <meta name="description" content="All text about keywords, other keywords" />

Recommended description tag length: up to 160 characters.

Keywords

Meta keywords tag are used to place your keywords that you think a surfer would search in Search engines. Repeating keywords unnecessarily would be considered spam and you may get permanently banned from SERP’s

  <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />

Recommended keywords tag length: up to 255 characters, 20 words.

Noindex

By using the noindex meta tag, you can signal to search engines to not include specific pages in their indexes.

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
  <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />

This is useful for pages like login, password reset, privacy policy, etc.

Nofollow

Nofollow meta tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page. It’s entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a nofollow (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

  <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
  <meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow" />

Canonical URL

Canonical link element tells a search engine what is the canonical or main URL for a content which have multiple URLs. The search engine will always return that URL, and link popularity and authority will be applied to that URL.

  <link rel="canonical" href="http://yoursite.com/canonical/url" />

MetaTags Usage

First, add this code to your main layout:

  <head>
    <%= display_meta_tags :site => 'My website' %>
  </head>

Then, to set the page title, add this to each of your views (see below for other options):

  <h1><%= title 'My page title' %></h1>

When views are rendered, the page title will be included in the right spots:

  <head>
    <title>My website | My page title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My page title</h1>
  </body>

You can find allowed options for display_meta_tags method below.

Using MetaTags in controller

You can define following instance variables:

  @page_title = 'Member Login'
  @page_description = 'Member login page.'
  @page_keywords = 'Site, Login, Members'

Also you could use set_meta_tags method to define all meta tags simultaneously:

  set_meta_tags :title => 'Member Login',
                :description => 'Member login page.',
                :keywords => 'Site, Login, Members'

You can find allowed options for set_meta_tags method below.

Using MetaTags in view

To set meta tags you can use following methods:

  <% title 'Member Login' %>
  <% description 'Member login page.' %>
  <% keywords 'Member login page.' %>

Also there is set_meta_tags method exists:

  <% set_meta_tags :title => 'Member Login',
                   :description => 'Member login page.',
                   :keywords => 'Site, Login, Members' %>

The title methods returns title itself, so you can use it to show the title somewhere on the page:

  <h1><%= title 'Member Login' %></h1>

If you want to set the title and display another text, use this:

  <h1><%= title 'Member Login', 'Here you can login to the site:' %></h1>

Allowed options for `display_meta_tags` and `set_meta_tags` methods

Use these options to customize the title format:

:site — site title;
:title — page title;
:description — page description;
:keywords — page keywords;
:prefix — text between site name and separator;
:separator — text used to separate website name from page title;
:suffix — text between separator and page title;
:lowercase — when true, the page name will be lowercase;
:reverse — when true, the page and site names will be reversed;
:noindex — add noindex meta tag; when true, ‘robots’ will be used, otherwise the string will be used;
:nofollow — add nofollow meta tag; when true, ‘robots’ will be used, otherwise the string will be used;
:canonical — add canonical link tag.

And here are a few examples to give you ideas.

  <%= title :separator => "&mdash;" %>
  <%= title :prefix => false, :separator => ":" %>
  <%= title :lowercase => true %>
  <%= title :reverse => true, :prefix => false %>

Allowed values

You can specify title as a string or array:

  set_meta_tags :title => ['part1', 'part2'], :site => 'site'
  # site | part1 | part2
  set_meta_tags :title => ['part1', 'part2'], :reverse => true, :site => 'site'
  # part2 | part1 | site

Keywords can be passed as string of comma-separated values, or as an array:

  set_meta_tags :keywords => ['tag1', 'tag2']
  # tag1, tag2

Description is a string (HTML will be stripped from output string).

Alternatives

There are several plugins influenced me to create this one:

Headliner: github.com/mokolabs/headliner
meta_on_rals: github.com/ashchan/meta_on_rails

Credits

Dmytro Shteflyuk (author) <kpumuk@kpumuk.info> kpumuk.info
Morgan Roderick (contributor) <morgan@roderick.dk> roderick.dk
Sergio Cambra (contributor) <sergio@entrecables.com>