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    Hi all,

    In an MSDN article about optimising MOSS 2007 Web Content Managemenet Sites for Search Engines it says that the title and description fields will display as meta tags.

     

    When I view source however, I dont see description appearing at all as a META tag.

    In fact, title also isnt appearing as a meta tag, its just appearing as a normal title tag. (Perhaps I am wrong here.)

     


    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
    <html __expr-val-dir="ltr" dir="ltr">
    <head><meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft SharePoint" /><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" /><title>
     
     What&#39;s On

    </title>

     

    Anyone know how to include title and description as proper meta tags?

    Tuesday, July 22, 2008 8:39 AM

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    There are (at least) two ways to achieve it: you'll either build your own controls or use something that's already been built.
    If you're not much of a developer or don't want to develop, there is a feature on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPWCMUtils. It should do the job for you.
    If you want to have maximum control, you'll end up writing a custom control which isn't that difficult.
    Let me know which solution suits you and if you need any more help.
    Tuesday, July 22, 2008 4:04 PM
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    First of all the description is an optional field so you can decide yourself whether you will use it or not. Secondly, it's up to you what to do with the information stored in different columns of a Publishing Page. Just because SharePoint doesn't provide a sufficient solution out-of-the-box, it doesn't mean that it's not doable. SharePoint is an application platform which ships with a lot of components. It is up to you to be creative and find a way to benefit of as many as you can.
    -- http://blog.mastykarz.nl
    Thursday, July 24, 2008 5:10 AM

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    There are (at least) two ways to achieve it: you'll either build your own controls or use something that's already been built.
    If you're not much of a developer or don't want to develop, there is a feature on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPWCMUtils. It should do the job for you.
    If you want to have maximum control, you'll end up writing a custom control which isn't that difficult.
    Let me know which solution suits you and if you need any more help.
    Tuesday, July 22, 2008 4:04 PM
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    I guess I'll need to use Codeplex's feature.

    But, why does the create page even prompt you for a description if it is never used anywhere. That description should definitely be in the meta description tag. I don't care about creating new meta tags - I just wwant the options that MOSS asks for to be used

    i.e.

    Title
    Description

    Title is used but if you hide the title in the page layout (i.e. you may not want it to appear on the screen) - it gets removed from the title tage in the html. Strange...no?
    Wednesday, July 23, 2008 8:18 AM
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    First of all the description is an optional field so you can decide yourself whether you will use it or not. Secondly, it's up to you what to do with the information stored in different columns of a Publishing Page. Just because SharePoint doesn't provide a sufficient solution out-of-the-box, it doesn't mean that it's not doable. SharePoint is an application platform which ships with a lot of components. It is up to you to be creative and find a way to benefit of as many as you can.
    -- http://blog.mastykarz.nl
    Thursday, July 24, 2008 5:10 AM
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    Thanks Waldek,
    I appreciate your response.

    However I have to disagree with your last statement - at least with the essence of it, for it is factually correct.

    I understand that I need to be creative in order to achieve creative solutions. However, I don't believe the achievement of a description META tag falls into that category. If MS punt MOSS as a suitable publishing website platform (which I agree it is) then I expect the title and description tage to be taken care of as search engines use them and SEO is a huge part of a public website.

    MOSS asks us to supply a description every time we create a site or page - but where is that description ever used? It should be used in the META description tag! I don't think it is suitable to expect partners to install codeplex code that is not supported by anyone onto a live solution for a customer - at least not for things like this.

    Of course, I expect custom dev for adding extra tags - but not for the simple description tag.

    Regards
    Wednesday, August 6, 2008 2:30 PM
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    To add to my last point - partners will often tell customers that we can build them an out of the box website with no code. I know that we can achieve more with custom dev - but its not in the budget and the customer is not expecting to pay for it. They do expect to have META description tags populated - they want a nornmal website. I would never have thought of telling them that that would cost them extra. 
    Wednesday, August 6, 2008 2:33 PM
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    Hi Steve,

    There are many different things people expect SharePoint to provide out of the box. What many of them, who work with SharePoint don't realize, is, that SharePoint is not an end user product: it's a development platform with really a lot of features. Because of this: there is no such thing as an out of the box solution - at least not in terms of Web Content Management.
    If you want to provide a successful WCM solution in MOSS there will be some custom code involved. Personally I believe that SharePoint developers should minimize custom code and reuse existing mechanisms like querying, searching and caching for example. On the other hand: you shouldn't be afraid to benefit of the extensibility that SharePoint provides.
    -- http://blog.mastykarz.nl
    Wednesday, August 6, 2008 8:09 PM