Bolt SEO extension

The Bolt SEO extension is an extension to help you improve the search engine indexing of your Bolt website in a number of ways. It does this by:

• Allowing you to specify the SEO title, meta description and (optionally) meta keywords for your records, with a Google snippet preview in the editor.
• Generating the <title>, and the meta, Open Graph and Twitter tags for your pages.
• Setting the <meta name="robots"> tag and og:type per record.
• Overriding the URL used in og:url and twitter:url, if you really want to.
• Setting defaults per route or content type listing, optionally per locale.

Compatibility

This extension supports different Bolt CMS versions depending on the major release:

• Bolt CMS 6 → Bolt SEO extension v2.x
• Bolt CMS 5 → Bolt SEO extension v1.x

This README documents usage for Bolt CMS 6.

Installation

composer require appolodev/bolt-seo

Setup

To use this extension, you should add a field to your contenttypes, and add the tags to the header of your HTML templates.

In your contenttypes, you should add a single seo field. The extension will use this to store the data for the different fields that show in the backend when editing a record. Simply add it to your fields like this:

pages:
    name: Pages
    singular_name: Page
    fields:
        [..]
        seo:
            type: seo
            group: "SEO settings"

You can assign the fields their own tab, using the group: 'SEO settings', to keep them organised in the backend.

After you've done this, it will look like this in the Bolt backend:

To add the SEO title and Meta tags to your HTML, edit your templates (the 'master' or 'header') to have the following:

    <title>{{ seo.title() }}</title>
    {{ seo.metatags() }}

When you've done this, all pages that make use of these templates will automatically have the correct <title> tag and the meta- and OG-tags.

Using individual values

Besides seo.metatags(), the seo object has a method for each value, so you can output them separately or use them in your own tags:

Method	Returns
seo.title()	The page title, as used in <title>
seo.description()	The meta description
seo.keywords()	The meta keywords
seo.image()	The URL of the image for og:image, or an empty string
seo.robots()	The value for <meta name="robots">
seo.ogtype()	The value for og:type
seo.canonical()	The URL for og:url and twitter:url

<meta name="description" content="{{ seo.description() }}">
<meta property="og:image" content="{{ seo.image() }}">

Each value comes from the first of these that is set:

1. the override_default entry for the current route;
2. the record's SEO field, for every value except image, which the SEO field doesn't store;
3. the record's own fields, as configured under fields, but only for title, description and image;
4. the default values in appolo-boltseo.yaml.

If none of them is set, the title falls back to Bolt's sitename and the description to Bolt's payoff. canonical falls back to the URL Bolt uses for <link rel="canonical">, ogtype to website, and robots to index, follow. image falls back to the record's image as Bolt finds it, or else stays empty.

On a content type listing, the title falls back to the name of the content type instead of the default title. On a taxonomy page it is "Overview for …", unless override_default sets one.

In PHP, for example in your own Twig function, you don't create the Seo class yourself. The same object is available as the seo Twig global:

use Appolo\BoltSeo\Seo\Seo;
use Twig\Environment;
use Twig\TwigFunction;

public function getFunctions(): array
{
    return [
        new TwigFunction('my_description', $this->myDescription(...), ['needs_environment' => true]),
    ];
}

public function myDescription(Environment $twig): string
{
    /** @var Seo $seo */
    $seo = $twig->getGlobals()['seo'];

    return $seo->description();
}

Configure the 'meta tags' output

By default, the output of the meta-tags is defined in the file vendor/appolodev/bolt-seo/templates/_metatags.html.twig. If you'd like to configure this output, you shouldn't edit this file directly. If you do, changes will be overwritten on subsequent updates of this extension. Instead, in /config/extensions/appolo-boltseo.yaml uncomment the following lines:

templates:
    meta: _metatags.html.twig

Next, copy the file _metatags.html.twig to your theme folder, and the extension will pick it up from there. The path is relative to your theme folder, so to keep the file in a subfolder, include it in the path, for example meta: partials/seo/_metatags.html.twig. The template receives the variables title, description, keywords, image, robots, ogtype and canonical.

Configuration

The first time the extension runs, Bolt copies its default configuration to config/extensions/appolo-boltseo.yaml. Every option is documented in that file, including:

• the title separator and postfix, and the maximum lengths of the fields;
• which of your content type fields are used as a fallback for the title, description and image;
• the default values, used when a record doesn't set its own;
• override_default, to set values per route or content type listing, with optional per-locale values.

The meta keywords field in the editor is disabled by default. To enable it, set keywords_length to a value above 0, for example 255.

Bolt never updates this copy, also not when you update the extension. To see options added in newer versions, compare your copy with vendor/appolodev/bolt-seo/config/config.yaml.

Note: If you'd like to contribute, or have a good idea, feel free to open an issue on the tracker at the SEO Extension repository on GitHub.

Contributors

• Bob den Otter: Thanks to him to allow me to use his original extension Bolt SEO