Finalist Blog: DrupalCon Europe 2022

Prague, perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe, was host to the annual Drupal conference DrupalCon this year! After two online editions because of the pandemic, it was finally time for an in person conference! What better place than the home of pilsener :D ? After a very long queue in Schiphol Airport, we were on our way... Day 1 The first day started with the traditional contribution session and then the conference kicked off with the Opening Ceremony and a keynote speech from the core initiative leads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13hyoDAFP9EAfter an…

Metadrop: The form API at the DrupalCon Prague

This year my session on the Form API workflow was selected for DrupalCon Prague. I was thrilled when I received the message that it had been selected, as to be honest, I have proposed the session at least four times (for Drupal Dev Days and the previous DrupalCons). Ever since I drew the Drupal 7 Form API workflow illustration years ago, I wanted to create a new one for Drupal 8, but I didn't find the time, so I decided to submit it to a Drupal event. Having a deadline is always a great push to do something.

The Drupal Form API illustration

Specbee: Configuring the Drupal 9 Metatag Module - A Brief Guide

Configuring the Drupal 9 Metatag Module - A Brief Guide Shefali Shetty 04 Oct, 2022 Subscribe to our Newsletter Now Subscribe Leave this field blank

Meta tags are often underrated. Sure, they are not visible on your page up front but they are those hidden ninjas that can elevate your SEO game. These modest snippets of text that describe your page can turn out to be invaluable. Information in the meta tags can appear in the search engine results, browser tab, and social media posts. The Drupal 9 Metatag module helps site builders dynamically create and manage these metadata (or meta) tags for each of their web pages through an interactive admin interface (and no code!).

With the Drupal Metatag module, you can provide structured metadata and even customize meta tag elements. Meta elements are tags used in HTML or XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a web page. They are part of a web page's head section. Multiple meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Let's dive in and learn how to improve your website’s SEO ranking by setting up the Metatag module the right way.

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Configuring the Drupal 9 Metatag Module

Meta tags can specify a web page's title, description, keywords, and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. You need to add meta tags in the head section of your Drupal 9 pages for the title, description, keywords, Twitter card, and Facebook open-graph - to make your website SEO friendly. Download and install the module here.

With the Drupal Metatag module, we can configure:

  • Meta tags for the home page(front page)
  • Meta tags for a Content-type
  • Meta tags for view pages

Let’s discuss more on configuring the Metatag module for each one of them.

Configuring Drupal 9 Meta tags for the Home page

After installing the module, you can edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags. Set the global configuration for the front page. Click on Edit to get into the details.

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Frontpage

Enter the Page Title, Description, Abstract, and Keywords.

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Frontpage

Page Title

This snippet is useful not only to search engines but also to your users. It appears in the title bar of your web page and should not exceed 55 characters. It also acts as a title for when your web page is bookmarked.

Description

Enter a brief description of your website. Make sure that the description does not exceed 150 characters because search engines won't display more than that on a results page. If you don't have either field filled out, Google will decide what to display without any input from you. It can be very helpful to write up a snappy description for your content here.

Abstract

Enter a brief Abstract (Optional). Again, keep it to fewer than 150 characters but instead of something snappy, try to be as plainly descriptive as possible.

Keywords

Enter a comma-separated list of keywords relevant to your website.

Advanced Settings and Custom Meta tags

There are some important elements here that were previously handled by code.

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Advanced Settings

Robots

Normally, if you want to block or allow search engines from indexing a page or disallow search engines to display cached copies or descriptions of your page, you would edit the site-wide Robots.txt file. Here, you can control all of it and more with the Robots meta tag by checking/unchecking the various indexing options it provides.

News Keywords

This Meta tag is exclusively used by Google News, which uses comma-separated keywords as inputs.

Rights

Any details about copyright or trademarks that you might have, should go here.

Image

This one is also relatively new and can be handy for telling social networks which image they should use with a post.

Canonical URL

Canonical URLs are very useful for dealing with duplicate content issues. This is something that is often a problem on e-commerce sites where product listings are duplicated on multiple pages. The Metatag module does a good job of handling this by default.

Shortlink URL

This element acts as an alternative to link shorteners. In Drupal they usually come out looking something like this:

Original Source

This tag is also something that Google came up with, this time to help identify the original source of content. This one may be particularly useful for news sites, but can be safely ignored by most.
Once you have updated all the fields, save your settings.

Configuring Drupal 9 Meta tags for a Content type

To configure meta tags for a content type, you will need to edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags and set the global configuration for Content. Click on Edit to get into the details. If you want to add different metatags for different content types, click on the “Add default Meta tags” link on the top left corner of the page. Select the content type you wish to add metatag to and click on Save and configure.

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Content types

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Content type: Article

The content type will be listed in the Meta tags screen. The above screenshot shows the content type ‘Article’. Click on Edit to add metatags.

Enter Page Title, Description, Abstract, and other necessary settings. Follow the same procedure as mentioned above in configuring metatags for the front page.

Configuring Drupal 9 Meta tags for View pages

Enable “Metatag: Views” module which is a sub-module of the metatag module.

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Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Views

Edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags. Click on override to get into the details.
To add the meta tags in view go to the views edit screen and click on the meta tags link.

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The above setting is the default setting for the view page.

Final Thoughts

The Drupal 9 Metatag module is a powerful amalgamation of various individual modules that aims at lowering manual coding to configure meta tags. Modules like the Page Title, Open graph Meta tags, Easy Meta, Refresh, and more are now merged into the Metatag module. It also provides multilingual support, can override meta tags based on entity objects, supports editorial workflows, and much more. As a leading Drupal development company, we implement best practices both in strategy and coding that can help you achieve project success. Starting a new Drupal project? Talk to our Drupal experts today to find out how we can help.

Author: Shefali Shetty

​​Meet Shefali Shetty, Director of Marketing at Specbee. An enthusiast for Drupal, she enjoys exploring and writing about the powerhouse. While not working or actively contributing back to the Drupal project, you can find her watching YouTube videos trying to learn to play the Ukulele :)

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