While you could theoretically add the necessary metadata tags yourself, Jekyll SEO Tag provides a battle-tested template of crowdsourced best-practices.
Jekyll SEO tag is designed to output machine-readable metadata for search engines and social networks to index and display. If you're looking for something to analyze your Jekyll site's structure and content (e.g., more traditional SEO optimization), take a look at [The Jekyll SEO Gem](https://github.com/pmarsceill/jekyll-seo-gem).
Jekyll SEO tag isn't designed to accommodate every possible use case. It should work for most site out of the box and without a laundry list of configuration options that serve only to confuse most users.
*`social` - For [specifying social profiles](https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/social-profiles). The following properties are available:
*`name` - If the user or organization name differs from the site's name
*`links` - An array of links to social media profiles.
Jekyll SEO Tag is designed to implement SEO best practices by default and to be the right fit for most sites right out of the box. If for some reason, you need more control over the output, read on:
Author information is used to propagate the `creator` field of Twitter summary cards. This should be an author-specific, not site-wide Twitter handle (the site-wide username be stored as `site.twitter.username`).
*TL;DR: In most cases, put `author: [your Twitter handle]` in the document's front matter, for sites with multiple authors. If you need something more complicated, read on.*
There are several ways to convey this author-specific information. Author information is found in the following order of priority:
1. An `author` object, in the documents's front matter, e.g.:
```yml
author:
twitter: benbalter
```
2. An `author` object, in the site's `_config.yml`, e.g.:
```yml
author:
twitter: benbalter
```
3.`site.data.authors[author]`, if an author is specified in the document's front matter, and a corresponding key exists in `site.data.authors`. E.g., you have the following in the document's front matter:
```yml
author: benbalter
```
And you have the following in `_data/authors.yml`:
```yml
benbalter:
picture: /img/benbalter.png
twitter: jekyllrb
potus:
picture: /img/potus.png
twitter: whitehouse
```
In the above example, the author `benbalter`'s Twitter handle will be resolved to `@jekyllrb`. This allows you to centralize author information in a single `_data/authors` file for site with many authors that require more than just the author's username.
*Pro-tip: If `authors` is present in the document's front matter as an array (and `author` is not), the plugin will use the first author listed, as Twitter supports only one author.*
The following options can be set for any particular page. While the default options are meant to serve most users in the most common circumstances, there may be situations where more precise control is necessary.
*`seo`
*`name` - If the name of the thing that the page represents is different from the page title. (i.e.: "Frank's Café" vs "Welcome to Frank's Café")
*`type` - The type of things that the page represents. This must be a [Schema.org type](http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html), and will probably usually be something like [`BlogPosting`](http://schema.org/BlogPosting), [`NewsArticle`](http://schema.org/NewsArticle), [`Person`](http://schema.org/Person), [`Organization`](http://schema.org/Organization), etc.
*`links` - An array of other URLs that represent the same thing that this page represents. For instance, Jane's bio page might include links to Jane's GitHub and Twitter profiles.
For most users, setting `image: [path-to-image]` on a per-page basis should be enough. If you need more control over how images are represented, the `image` property can also be an object, with the following options:
*`path` - The relative path to the image. Same as `image: [path-to-image]`
*`twitter` - The relative path to a Twitter-specific image.
*`facebook` - The relative path to a Facebook-specific image.
*`height` - The height of the Facebook (`og:image`) image
*`width` - The width of the Facebook (`og:image`) image
You can use any of the above, optional properties, like so:
You can define a default image using [Front Matter default](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/#front-matter-defaults), to provide a default Twitter Card or OGP image to all of your posts and pages.
Here is a very basic example, that you are encouraged to adapt to your needs:
Titles will be processed using [Jekyll's `smartify` filter](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/templates/). This will use SmartyPants to translate plain ASCII punctuation into "smart" typographic punctuation. This will not render or strip any Markdown you may be using in a page title.
