Other SSGs > Managing SEO

Managing SEO

Given a record object, you can obtain its title, description, OpenGraph and Twitter card meta tags with the .seoMetaTags method:

// dato.config.js
const htmlTag = require('html-tag');
// The `toHtml` function below helps transforming an array of structured objects like this:
// { tagName: 'meta', attributes: { name: 'description', content: 'foobar' } }
// into proper HTML tags:
// <meta name="description" content="foobar" />
const toHtml = (tags) => (
  tags.map(({ tagName, attributes, content }) => (
    htmlTag(tagName, attributes || {}, content)
  )).join("")
);
module.exports = (dato, root, i18n) => {
  root.createPost(`content/about.md`, 'yaml', {
    frontmatter: {
      title: dato.aboutPage.title,
      type: 'about',
      seoMetaTags: toHtml(dato.aboutPage.seoMetaTags),
    },
    content: dato.aboutPage.content
  });
};

This will generate a pretty long frontmatter, contaning the complete set of meta tags for the page:

---
title: "About me"
type: "about"
seoMetaTags: '<title>About me</title><meta property="og:title" content="About me"><meta...'
---
This is the page content, yay!!

Meta tags are generated merging the values present in the record's SEO meta tags field together with the Global SEO settings you can configure under Content > Settings:

If the record doesn't have a SEO meta tags field, the method tries to guess reasonable values by inspecting the other fields of the record (single-line strings and images).

Your page title will be composed concatenating the title of the record together with the Title suffix setting. If the total length of the title exceeds 60 characters, the suffix will be omitted.

In the templates of your static website, you can then use them inside in your <head> section.

Favicon meta tags

Under the Content > Settings section you can also configure your website favicon:

You can get desktop, iOS, Android and Windows Phone favicon meta tags with the dato.site.faviconMetaTags method:

// dato.config.js
module.exports = (dato, root, i18n) => {
  // Create a YAML data file to store global data about the site
  root.createDataFile('data/settings.yml', 'yaml', {
    faviconMetaTags: toHtml(dato.site.faviconMetaTags),
  });
};

This will be the content of src/data/settings.yml:

faviconMetaTags: '<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="57x57" href="https://www.datocms-assets.com/604/123-favicon.png?h=57&w=57"><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="60x60" ...'

You can then use the generated snippet in the <head> section of your static website.

Questions?

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