Rack SEO takes a page, analyses the content and provides relevant meta tags based on the words in the page. It's easy to configure (via a YAML file) so you can control all your SEO meta tags from one place. Works for any existing Rack application (including Rails, Sinatra, Padrino etc.)

Dear God, why?

SEO tags are a common client request and it seems like a lot of time and effort is wasted on sub-par solutions. Often, these tags are based on content that already appears in the page and this gem helps to streamline that process. Also, it gets the implementation out of your app logic so you can concentrate on doing more interesting stuff whilst keeping our search bot overlords happy.

If that still doesn't convince you, that's fine. My only other reason was that my New Year's resolutions for 2013 included write a gem and write some Rack Middleware so here it is.

Features

Provides keyword relevant title, meta-description and meta-keyword tags for every page
Use CSS selectors to pull any content into the title tag
Use CSS selectors to specify where to look for the meta description and keyword content e.g. "#intro"
Fully configurable for each path your app, with wildcard matching using regular expressions

Installation

#Assuming Mac OSX and Homebrew 
brew update
brew install libxml2 # (you might need to brew link libxml2 as well)
brew install glib   

#Follow instructions to install the summarize gem
#Don't just gem install as it's out of date on Rubygems
git clone https://github.com/ssoper/summarize.git
cd summarize
rake build
gem build summarize.gemspec
gem install summarize-1.0.4.gem

gem install rack-seo

Usage

In your Gemfile:

gem 'rack-seo'

then run bundle install

and in your config.ru:

use Rack::RackSeo

or to specify your own config file

use Rack::RackSeo :config => "/path/to/config/rack_seo.yml"

The config file

You can put the YAML config wherever you like but I would suggest config/rack_seo.yml for convention. The format is as follows:

---
# default is the fallback for any paths that you have not specified
# explicitly.
default: 
  # title_format is a ruby string which parses out anything between {{
  # and }} as a CSS selector (using Nokogiri) and pulls out the inner_text
  title_format: "{{h1}} - Acme Ltd"
  # meta_description_selector lets you specify where to pull the text
  # content from to extract the summary text. The default is #content,
  # falling back to the <body> tag if that isn't present. You can
  # specify your own below. It pulls out the inner text and should only
  # match one div or item.
  meta_description_selector: "#my_juicy_keyword_rich_summary_div"
  # Same as the description selector, but automatically generates a
  # comma separated list from the content provided
  meta_keywords_selector: "#my_tag_stuffed_p_tag"
# The custom key (optional) contains any paths you'd like to specify.
# These are tested against the current path, longest first to match the
# most specific by default.
custom:
  -
    matcher: '/blog'
    title_format: "The Acme Company Blog - {{#content h1}}"
    meta_description_selector: "#post_content"
    meta_keywords_selector: "#comments"
  -
    matcher: '/contact-us'
    # Plain old strings are fine too
    title_format: "How to contact us about faulty anvils"
    # You can skip the other selectors if you're happy with the
    # #content/<body> defaults
  -
    # Matching wildcards works through regular expressions, though
    # it's not pretty
    matcher: !ruby/regexp '/\/news\/.*/'
    title_format: "{{.article_body h3}} - Acme News"

Caveats

Processes on every request, so be sure to use caching in production
Uses the summarize gem, which is a wrapper around "The Open Text Summarizer". This has dependencies of its own (see installation) so will probably not work out of the box on Heroku.

Credits

I originally did a proof of concept for this using the Rack Pagespeed middleware so thanks to @julio_ody for his work on that.

The clever stuff (text summarization and keyword extraction) is all handled by the summarize gem at the moment so credit to @ssoper and LibOTS for their work. Other summarizers (maybe even in pure Ruby) are a focus going forward.

Contributing to Rack SEO

Contributors are very welcome! Use Github issues for feature requests and other suggestions/improvements. This project uses RSpec for tests.

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet.
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it.
Fork the project.
Start a feature/bugfix branch.
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright

FAQs

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Package last updated on 02 Mar 2013

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Install

rack-seo

Rack SEO