Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for Ruby on Rails applications.
MetaTags master branch now fully supports Rails 3.0+ and is not backward compatible. Latest version fully compatible with 2.x is 1.2.3.
Add the "meta-tags" gem to your Gemfile.
gem 'meta-tags'
And run bundle install command.
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.
set_meta_tags :title => 'Member Login'
# <title>Some Page Title</title>
set_meta_tags :site => 'Site Title', :title => 'Member Login'
# <title>Site Title | Page Title</title>
set_meta_tags :site => 'Site Title', :title => 'Member Login', :reverse => true
# <title>Page Title | Site Title</title>
Recommended title tag length: up to 70 characters, 10 words.
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.
set_meta_tags :description => "All text about keywords, other keywords"
# <meta name="description" content="All text about keywords, other keywords" />
Recommended description tag length: up to 160 characters.
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
set_meta_tags :keywords => %w[keyword1 Keyword2 KeyWord3]
# <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />
Recommended keywords tag length: up to 255 characters, 20 words.
By using the noindex meta tag, you can signal to search engines to not include specific pages in their indexes.
set_meta_tags :noindex => true
# <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
set_meta_tags :noindex => 'googlebot'
# <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />
This is useful for pages like login, password reset, privacy policy, etc.
Further reading:
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.
set_meta_tags :nofollow => true
# <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
set_meta_tags :nofollow => 'googlebot'
# <meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow" />
Further reading:
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.
set_meta_tags :canonical => "http://yoursite.com/canonical/url"
# <link rel="canonical" href="http://yoursite.com/canonical/url" />
Further reading:
Link to your Google+ profile using rel="author"
set_meta_tags :author => "http://yourgplusprofile.com/profile/url"
# <link rel="author" href="http://yourgplusprofile.com/profile/url" />
Further reading:
Link to your Google+ profile using rel="publisher"
set_meta_tags :publisher => "http://yourgplusprofile.com/profile/url"
# <link rel="publisher" href="http://yourgplusprofile.com/profile/url" />
Alternate link elements tell a search engine when there is content that's translated or targeted to users in a certain region.
set_meta_tags :alternate => { "fr" => "http://yoursite.fr/alternate/url" }
# <link rel="alternate" href="http://yoursite.fr/alternate/url" hreflang="fr" />
set_meta_tags :alternate => { "fr" => "http://yoursite.fr/alternate/url",
"de" => "http://yoursite.de/alternate/url" }
# <link rel="alternate" href="http://yoursite.fr/alternate/url" hreflang="en" />
# <link rel="alternate" href="http://yoursite.de/alternate/url" hreflang="de" />
Further reading:
Previous and next links indicate indicate the relationship between individual URLs. Using these attributes is a strong hint to Google that you want us to treat these pages as a logical sequence.
set_meta_tags :prev => "http://yoursite.com/url?page=1"
# <link rel="prev" href="http://yoursite.com/url?page=1" />
set_meta_tags :next => "http://yoursite.com/url?page=3"
# <link rel="next" href="http://yoursite.com/url?page=3" />
Further reading:
Meta refresh is a method of instructing a web browser to automatically refresh the current web page or frame after a given time interval. It is also possible to instruct the browser to fetch a different URL when the page is refreshed, by including the alternative URL in the content parameter. By setting the refresh time interval to zero (or a very low value), this allows meta refresh to be used as a method of URL redirection.
set_meta_tags :refresh => 5
# <meta content="5" http-equiv="refresh" />
set_meta_tags :refresh => '5;url=http://example.com'
# <meta content="5;url=http://example.com" http-equiv="refresh" />
Further reading:
Any namespace can be built just passing any symbol name and a Hash. For example:
set_meta_tags :foo => {
:bar => "lorem",
:baz => {
:qux => "ipsum"
}
}
# <meta property="foo:bar" content="lorem"/>
# <meta property="foo:baz:qux" content="ipsum"/>
Repeated meta tags can be built just using an Array inside a Hash. For example:
set_meta_tags :og => {
:image = ["http://example.com/rock.jpg", "http://example.com/rock2.jpg"]
}
#<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/rock.jpg" />
#<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/rock2.jpg" />
To turn your web pages into graph objects, you'll need to add Open Graph
protocol <meta> tags to your webpages. The tags allow you to specify
structured information about your web pages. The more information you provide, the more opportunities your web pages can be surfaced within Facebook today
and in the future. Here's an example for a movie page:
set_meta_tags :og => {
:title => 'The Rock',
:type => 'video.movie',
:url => 'http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/',
:image => 'http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg',
:video => {
:director => 'http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000881/',
:writer => ['http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0918711/', 'http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0177018/']
}
}
# <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
# <meta property="og:type" content="video.movie"/>
# <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/"/>
# <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
# <meta property="og:video:director" content="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000881/"/>
# <meta property="og:video:writer" content="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0918711/"/>
# <meta property="og:video:writer" content="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0177018/"/>
Further reading:
Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. There are 3 card types (summary, photo and player). Here's an example for summary:
set_meta_tags :twitter => {
:card => "summary",
:site => "@username"
}
# <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/>
# <meta name="twitter:site" content="@username"/>
Take in consideration that if you're already using OpenGraph to describe data on your page, it’s easy to generate a Twitter card without duplicating your tags and data. When the Twitter card processor looks for tags on your page, it first checks for the Twitter property, and if not present, falls back to the supported Open Graph property. This allows for both to be defined on the page independently, and minimizes the amount of duplicate markup required to describe your content and experience.
When you need to generate a Twitter Photo card, twitter:image property is a string, while image dimensions are specified using twitter:image:width and twitter:image:height, or a Hash objects in terms of MetaTags gems. There is a special syntax to make this work:
set_meta_tags :twitter => {
:card => "photo",
:image => {
:_ => "http://example.com/1.png",
:width => 100,
:height => 100,
}
}
# <meta name="twitter:card" content="photo"/>
# <meta name="twitter:image" content="http://example.com/1.png"/>
# <meta name="twitter:image:width" content="100"/>
# <meta name="twitter:image:height" content="100"/>
Further reading:
Starting from version 1.3.1, you can specify arbitrary meta tags, and they will be rendered on the page, even if meta-tags gem does not know about them.
Example:
set_meta_tags :author => "Dmytro Shteflyuk"
# <meta name="author" content="Dmytro Shteflyuk"/>
You can also specify value as an Array, and values will be displayed as a list
of meta tags:
set_meta_tags :author => [ "Dmytro Shteflyuk", "John Doe" ]
# <meta name="author" content="Dmytro Shteflyuk"/>
# <meta name="author" content="John Doe"/>
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.
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.
You can define title, description and keywords of any view in your locales file.
en:
meta_tags:
visitors:
index:
title: My page title
description: My page description
keywords: My, Page, Keywords
This would default the controller visitors with action index title, description and keywords.
You can still overwrite them from a view or controller like normally.
To set meta tags you can use following methods:
<% title 'Member Login' %>
<% description 'Member login page.' %>
<% keywords 'Member login page.' %>
<% nofollow %>
<% noindex %>
<% refresh 3 %>
Also there is set_meta_tags method exists:
<% set_meta_tags :title => 'Member Login',
:description => 'Member login page.',
:keywords => 'Site, Login, Members' %>
The title method 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>
Use these options to customize the title format:
:site— site title;:title— page title;:description— page description;:keywords— page keywords;:charset— page character set;: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;:author— add author link tag;:publisher— add publisher link tag;:prev— add prev link tag;:next— add next link tag;:og— add Open Graph tags (Hash);:twitter— add Twitter tags (Hash);:refresh— refresh interval and optionally url to redirect to.
And here are a few examples to give you ideas.
<%= display_meta_tags :separator => "—".html_safe %>
<%= display_meta_tags :prefix => false, :separator => ":" %>
<%= display_meta_tags :lowercase => true %>
<%= display_meta_tags :reverse => true, :prefix => false %>
<%= display_meta_tags :og => { :title => 'The Rock', :type => 'video.movie' } %>
<%= display_meta_tags :alternate => { 'zh-Hant' => 'http://example.com.tw/base/url' } %>
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).
Sometimes, it is desirable to mirror meta tag values down into namespaces. A
common use case is when you want open graph's og:title to be identical to
the title.
Say, you have the following in your application layout:
display_meta_tags :og => {
:title => :title
}
The value of og[:title] is a symbol and therefore references the value of the
top level title meta tag. With the following in any view:
title 'my great view'
You get this open graph meta tag for free:
<meta property="og:title" content="my great view"></meta>
jQuery.pjax is a nice solution for navigation
without full page reload. The main difference is that layout file will not be rendered,
so page title will not change. To fix this, when using a page fragment, pjax will check
the fragment DOM element for a title or data-title attribute and use any value it finds.
MetaTags simplifies this with display_title method, which returns fully resolved
page title (include site, prefix/suffix, etc.) But in this case you will have to
set default parameters (e.g, :site) both in layout file and in your views. To minimize
code duplication, you can define a helper in application_helper.rb:
def default_meta_tags
{
:title => 'Member Login',
:description => 'Member login page.',
:keywords => 'Site, Login, Members',
:separator => "—".html_safe,
}
end
Then in your layout file use:
<%= display_meta_tags(default_meta_tags) %>
And in your pjax templates:
<!-- set title here, so we can use it both in "display_title" and in "title" %>
<% title "My Page title" %>
<%= content_tag :div, :data => { :title => display_title(default_meta_tags) } do %>
<h1><%= title %></h1>
<!-- HTML goes here -->
<% end %>