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October 8, 2020 11:03 am GMT

Meta tags: All you need to know for your Gatsby blog

When you share your Gatsby blog to the world, youll want to make sure you give a good first impression. With react-helmet and meta tags, we can make sure your posts show up in Google like this:

And on Twitter like this:

What are meta tags?

Meta tags live in the header of every web page:

<html>    <head>        <title>Emma Goto</title>    </head></html>

This is what Google, Twitter and other sites use when they are rendering previews of your website.

Its important to get your meta tags right, because you want users to click the link! Theyre more likely to do this if what they see intrigues them, whether its from a fancy image or a relevant description.

Install the React Helmet plugin for Gatsby

To get started with meta tags on your Gatsby blog, youll need to install gatsby-plugin-react-helmet.

If you created your blog using a template like gatsby-starter-blog, youll probably already have this plugin installed.

If not, you can install it:

yarn add gatsby-plugin-react-helmet// ornpm install gatsby-plugin-react-helmet

And then make sure to add it to your list of plugins:

// gatsby-config.jsconst config = {    plugins: [        // ... all your other plugins        'gatsby-plugin-react-helmet',    ]}

Create a component using React Helmet

After installing the plugin, you can create your React Helmet component:

// src/components/seo/index.jsimport React from 'react';import Helmet from 'react-helmet';const SEO = () => (    <Helmet        htmlAttributes={{            lang: 'en',        }}    />);

Make sure render this component on every page of your blog!

Pass in props and use the useStaticQuery hook

Before we get started with the meta tags, youll also want to make sure that you pass in any relevant data as props, like post titles and slugs:

const SEO = ({ description, title, slug }) => {

You can also make use of the useStaticQuery hook to grab your site's metadata:

// src/components/seo/index.jsimport { useStaticQuery, graphql } from 'gatsby';const SEO = ({ description, title, slug }) => {    const { site } = useStaticQuery(        graphql`            query {                site {                    siteMetadata {                        title                        description                        author                        siteUrl                    }                }            }        `,    );

This will grab any site metadata that has been stored in your config file:

// gatsby-config.jsconst config = {  siteMetadata: {    title: `Emma Goto`,    description: `Front-end development and side projects.`,    author: `Emma Goto`,    siteUrl: `https://www.emgoto.com`,  },  // ...}

Adding your pages title

Now we can get started with the most important piece of information - your pages title. This is what shows up as the title of your post on Google, as well as what you see as the title of the page in your browser.

<Helmet    title={title}    titleTemplate={`%s  ${site.siteMetadata.title}`}    defaultTitle={site.siteMetadata.title}/>

There are three separate title props we can pass in here. The logic is as follows:

If the title value exists, it will be used in combination with the titleTemplate value
Otherwise, it will fall back to showing the defaultTitle value

Using my blog as an example, if Im on a blog posts page I pass in its title as a prop. My title looks like this:

Name of the blog post  Emma Goto

If Im on the home page, the title value will be undefined, and instead the defaultTitle is be used:

Emma Goto

Adding your pages description

After your title, the second-most important thing would be your description. This is what can show up underneath the title in a Google search result.

Similar to the title, I either have a description specific to my post (passed in as a prop), or else I show my default description:

<Helmet    //...    meta={[        {            name: 'description',            content: description || site.siteMetadata.description,        },    ]}/>

Getting a posts description

If you want specific descriptions for your posts, you can manually write them and store it on your posts front matter.

If you have a huge backlog of posts without custom descriptions, or you dont want to write them yourself, each posts first 140 characters are stored in an excerpt value:

query($slug: String!) {    markdownRemark(frontmatter: { slug: { eq: $slug } }) {      excerpt      frontmatter {        slug        title      }    }}

Adding Open Graph meta tags

To add social media-specific meta tags, we can use Open Graph meta tags. These meta tags were originally created and used by Facebook, but are now also used by other social media sites like Twitter.

{    property: `og:title`,    content: title || site.siteMetadata.title,},{    property: 'og:description',    content: description || site.siteMetadata.description,},{    property: `og:type`,    content: `website`,},

If you dont use these, social media sites may fall back to your default title and description values. But I would include them just to be on the safe side.

Youll notice that we are using property instead of name for the meta tag name here. This is something youll need to do specifically when using Open Graph meta tags.

Adding Twitter-specific meta tags

By default, Twitter will make use of the Open Graph meta tags. But if you wanted to have specific meta tags only for Twitter, Twitter also provides their own meta tags which will override the Open Graph ones:

{    name: 'twitter:title',    content: title || site.siteMetadata.title,},

Should I add the twitter:creator and twitter:site meta tags?

You may have come across twitter:site and twitter:creator:

{    name: `twitter:creator`,    content: '@emma_goto',},{    name: `twitter:site`,    content: '@emma_goto',},

In the past, Twitter link previews would contain your Twitter handle, but as far as I can tell, these values are no longer used.
The meta tags are still mentioned in their documentation though, so if you still want to include them it doesnt hurt to do so.

Adding images to your link previews

To add an image when you share your blogs link on Twitter, youll need Open Graphs image meta tag:

{    property: 'og:image',    content: 'image-url-here',},

Twitter can render your link preview image in two ways. Either with a 240x240 square image:

Or a larger 800x418 image, like you saw at the top of this post.

When choosing an image, youll also have to let Twitter know which size you are using. For the large image youll need to include this:

{    name: 'twitter:card',    content: 'summary_large_image',},

And for the small, square image, youll need to add this:

{    name: 'twitter:card',    content: 'summary',},

Pro-tip: Cover images on DEV

If you are cross-posting your Gatsby posts to DEV, youll be able to provide a 1000x420 cover image to be used on DEV.

This same image will be used if your DEV post is shared on Twitter - and since Twitter images have a width of 800px the edges of your DEV cover image will be cut off. Youll want to make sure that your DEV cover images have a sufficient amount of padding on either side, so that nothing important is cut off.

For reference, this is the cover image that I use on DEV:

Adding your favicon

To get an icon to show up next to your website's name, youll need to include a favicon value:

import favicon from '../../images/favicon.png';<Helmet    link={[        {            rel: 'shortcut icon',            type: 'image/png',            href: `${favicon}`,         },    ]}/>

My favicon is a 192x192 PNG image, which seems to do the trick.

How do I get dates to show up on Google search results?

You may have noticed that when you search on Google, some posts will show a published date. This isnt something you can explicitly control or set a meta tag for. As long as you clearly render a date on your posts, Google should be able to pick it up, and will decide whether it's worth showing or not.

Tools to test your link previews

If you want to test how your site would look if it was shared on social media, Twitter and Facebook both provide their own preview tools to do so:

Conclusion

This post should give you everything you need to know to add meta tags to your Gatsby blog. To see the full code for my sites SEO component, you can head over to Github.

If youre adding any logic to your SEO component (like different sets of meta tags on different pages) I would also recommend adding some unit tests! You can check out the unit tests for my SEO component for some inspiration.

Thanks for reading!

Original Link: https://dev.to/emma/meta-tags-all-you-need-to-know-for-your-gatsby-blog-n2p

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