Question

There's plenty of discussion of TWiki's internal META data. But what of the META tags usually found in the HEAD tag of HTML pages?

I would like to be able to specify the <meta name="Description" content=""> and <meta name="Keywords" content=""> META tags in order to improve the results from search engines. As far as I can tell, TWiki doesn't currently support this, nor does any other wiki I've heard about. This should perhaps be a FeatureEnhancementRequest instead, but I'm not sure where to put it. Here's a sandbox topic to illustrate it: http://g-b.dk/bin/view/Sandbox/MetaTag

Environment

-- TorbenGB - 07 Apr 2004

Answer

There are not many search engines using these META tags. Most of them use full text index.

-- StephanPulver - 12 Apr 2004

You can (mis)use the HTTP_EQUIV_ON_VIEW preferences variable to add heading tags. This setting is designed to set http equiv but can be used for anything in the header. See example at TWikiPreferences

Note that you need a recent TWikiBetaRelease if you need a per page setting.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Apr 2004

Corollary

There are not many search engines using these META tags. -- StephanPulver --> I have just the opposite impression; keyword and description meta data is very useful for quality in search results. Do you have any documentation on this?

You can (mis)use the HTTP_EQUIV_ON_VIEW preferences variable to add heading tags. -- PeterThoeny --> That's an interesting possibility. Do you mean that (with a recent beta) this could be used per page? That would come close to the solution I'm looking for, though admittedly not in a very elegant way.

-- TorbenGB - 20 Apr 2004

why not just drop something like:

%INCLUDE{%TWIKIWEB%.%METATOPIC%}%

into your skin template (pattern.view.tmpl, for example)

then go to TWikiPreferences and

Set %METATOPIC% = TWikiMetaTags

then go create the TWikiMetaTags topic and put any tags into the header you like between STARTINCLUDE and STOPINCLUDE. I would also suggest you set your permissions so the public could not edit the meta topic page.

Sounds like an interesting feature, let me know if you need help setting it up, I work cheap

-- TravisBarker - 17 Oct 2006