Sitemapper - Easy SEO engine

Sitemapper will help you in various SEO techniques such as sitemap.xml auto generation.

Installation

You can install the development version with

% sudo gem install milk-it-sitemapper -s http://gems.github.com

Or the release version with

% sudo gem install sitemapper

Examples

Ruby On Rails

Sitemapper will automagically generate a sitemap.xml file for you when your rails application start, this sitemap.xml will include all your URLs that Sitemapper consider ‘static’, for example:

map.todo '/to-do' # Sitemapper will consider this as static
map.articles '/articles/:year/:month' # Will be considered this dynamic
map.connect '*path' # Will be considered dynamic

The generation of your sitemap.xml will happen on your application boot, but it won’t delete any URL previous added (we hope to be able to do so very soon - a merge).

In your application, you can use the accessors provided by Sitemapper to dynamically add URLs, for example, supose a blog app:

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
  ...
  def create
    # do all the creation stuff
    map_url(article_url(@article)) # add the URL to your sitemap
  end

  def destroy
    # do all the deletion stuff
    unmap_url(article_url(@article))
  end
  ...
end

You can also do it on your sweepers (which is a better choice)

class ArticleSweeper < ActionController::Caching::Sweeper
  observe Article, Account

  def after_create(record)
    # expire everything you need
    map_url(polymorphic_url(record))
  end

  def after_destroy(record)
    # expire everything you need
    map_url(polymorphic_url(record))
  end
end

Merb

Sorry, we do not support Merb yet. (Actually, it will depend on the demand)

Mapping multiple URLs

If you need to map multiple urls, it’s high recommended to use #map_urls, to do so:

map.map_urls do |map|
  map.map_url('http://www.example.org/about')
  ...
end

or, if you are in a Sweeper or Controller

map_urls do |map|
 ...
end

Other SEO techniques

With SEO, you’ll have some view helpers to easily apply some SEO techniques to your website/webapp.

In your application layout, just do it:

<head>
    <%= title('My Personal Blog') %>
    <%= page_meta %>
</head>

And in your action views, you put this:

<% page(:title => 'Contact',
  :desc => 'Here you'll can contact our customer support ...',
  :keywords => 'contact, support, customer') %>

In this case, the view will be rendered in this way:

<head>
    <title>Contact :: My Personal Blog</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Here you'll can contact our customer support ..." />
    <meta name="keywords" content="contact, support, customer" />
</head>

If you want to change the title separator, just do:

...
<%= title('My Personal Blog', :separator => ' - ') %>
...

Or, you can als use any object that respond to title or name (for page title), short_description or description, tag_list or keywords.

<% page(@event) %>

If you need to change the default method lookup for page, you have two ways:

Add an initializer with the following content (that will change the default method lookup sequence):

Sitemapper.meta_lookup = {:title => [:my_default_title_method, :my_second_default_title_method]
  :desc => [:my_default_description_method, :my_second_default_description_method],
  :keywords => [:my_default_keywords_method, :my_second_default_keywords_methods]
}

Configure per object (yes, object, not just ActiveRecord descendents) lookups:

class MyObject
  map_fields :title => :weird_title, :desc => :weird_description, :keywords => :weird_keywords
  ...
end

If you don’t specify all the fields, it’ll be merged with the Sitemapper.meta_lookup config.

Hope you enjoy!

If you want to suggest any other SEO technique, suggest it on [email protected]

To do:

* Add sitemap options to routes
* Create separate files for dynamic and static routes (then, we'll can
  delete all the static on startup)
* Write test code (sorry, I really didn't it)