Accurate page titles are an important part of the SEO for
any website. However the architecture of a modern
web application relies on the content for each individual page being surrounded by a
single layout to help keep the overall layout easy to maintain.
This can have a detrimental effect on SEO as Google (and the
others) don’t approve of repetition of page titles as it doesn’t provide
helpful information to your users.
The Rails Approach to Page titles
Let’s setup your app so you can have custom page titles and
a fall back title for those you forget.
First in your application.html.erb file (or the page you
are using for the layout) add this line of text:
<title><%= content_for?(:title) ? content_for(:title) : "Beo |
London based results driven web design & development" %></title>
Here are the standard <title> tags for your website
with a dynamic bit of code in-between. The code looks to see if you have a
custom title and if not displays the default page title (but remember this is
something we are trying to avoid!).
Next we need to add in the method referenced above, in your
application_helper.rb file add this:
def title(page_title)
content_for(:title)
{ page_title }
end
Now we need to go to
each of our individual pages and insert a line of code, for example on our
services.html.erb page we have:
<%- title "Beo
| London based results driven web design & development | Services" %>
Again, it’s pretty
simple, the code passes the hard coded title to the helper which in turn passes
it to the application layout.
Go through each of your
pages adding in some custom text for each title.
SEO tips from www.beo.so
