Site Description in Browser

[wilkins]

site description in browser

[Dkozikowski+]

Hello there Mr Wilkins

You need to add a meta description field in your image_template.html file.

If you look at the source code of this file you will see your "keywords" -
<meta http-equiv="content-type" name="keywords" content="Ty, Wilkins, Ty Wilkins, Design, Identity, Branding, Tulsa, New Medio" />

Underneath or above this you can add the "description" like so:
<meta name="description" content="Ty Wilkins." />

You can change the Ty Wilkins part to anything you wish like, "Welcome, this is my photoblog."

Currently, google displays the weird information because it scans your webpage and pulls out text from it. It does this becuase it could not find the meta description tag. Once you add the description tag, next time google bot scans your site, it should update the description to whatever you have chosen to display.

[austriaka+]

For page ranking in Google it is said to be important having a different description in each and every page.
When I am looking at the search terms in image stats addon, I have quite a lot of hits, and most of them are images with a description.
My META description line:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description" content="<SITE_TITLE>-PhotoBlog: <IMAGE_TITLE>, <IMAGE_NOTES_CLEAN>" />

KArin

As Austriaka said, the image-description, which is available as a tag, must be included in the meta-tags of the template

so the meta-description will be generated dynamically all the time and the google bot will always find a new description

[Dkozikowski+]

Originally Posted by austriaka

For page ranking in Google it is said to be important having a different description in each and every page.
KArin

That's good to know! I was not aware of this as I'm not terribly concerned about my search rankings but thanks for the info!

[austriaka+]

I read an article about that a few days ago, but I cannot find it anymore.
So a short summary:
Google doesn't use the META description for displaying search results. But Google reads the descriptions when spidering a site.
Two things seem to be important for search engine bots:
+ Having different description on any page, according to the content of the page
+ Using words and phrases in META description which are also found within the specific page content (for outknocking META spam)

You saw my Image statistics. I don't have any page rank for my blog, but I have quite a lot of hits from keyword search (about 75 in January) what I think is fine for a fresh installed amateur photoblog.

LG
KArin

[austriaka+]

You have two Meta description entries on your page:

<meta name="description" content="Design portfolio of Ty Wilkins." />

<meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description" content="<Ty Wilkins>-PhotoBlog: Discipleship Focus, Discipleship Focus approached New Medio for a new website. In the process of designing their site I quickly created a new suggested logo. I was glad to discover that they chose to roll with the design. The mark consists of four arrows pointing inwards to form a cross.
" />

You can change that in the template files. If you don't want to use the image description of the page in Meta description, just strip off the <IMAGE_NOTES_CLEAN> tag

KArin

[Mav]

Hmm, actually with 1.6 and the new tag features... Image_template could(should?) be using the tags as keywords, instead of the image title.

But I couldn't find a pixelpost-tag that would render tags without htmlcode around them. So I just added that to the code with the use of a new tag, and it works nicely. If you want to use it too, here's how:

In addons/paged_archive.php on line 610, you'll see something like this. I've added 3 lines, marked with a +:

while(list($tag)  = mysql_fetch_array($tags))
{
	$tags_img .= '<a href="index.php?x=browse&amp;tag='.$tag.'">'.$tag.'</a> ';
	$tags_paged_img .= '<a href="index.php?x=browse&amp;tag='.$tag.'&amp;pagenum=1">'.$tag.'</a> ';
+	$tags_keywords .= $tag.', ';
}
$tags_img = trim($tags_img);
$tags_paged_img = trim($tags_paged_img);
+   $tags_keywords = str_replace('_',' ',$tags_keywords);

$tpl = str_replace("<TAG_LINKS_AS_LIST>",$tags_output,$tpl); //thumbnails in this page
$tpl = str_replace("<TAG_LINKS_AS_LIST_PAGED>",$tags_paged_output,$tpl); //thumbnails in this page
$tpl = str_replace("<TAG_IMG_LIST>",$tags_img,$tpl); // list of tags for showed image
$tpl = str_replace("<TAG_IMG_LIST_PAGED>",$tags_paged_img,$tpl); // list of tags for showed image
+   $tpl = str_replace("<TAG_IMG_LIST_KEYWORDS>",$tags_keywords,$tpl); // list of tags for meta keywords

Now you can use <TAG_IMG_LIST_KEYWORDS> instead of the image title:

<meta http-equiv="keywords" name="keywords" content="<TAG_IMG_LIST_KEYWORDS>Photography, Pixelpost, Photoblog" />

And add your own general tags, your name or whatever at the end. Note there's no space after the keywords-tag, that's already added by the script.


On an other note, this seems to be wrong: <meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description"
The w3c says that 'http-equiv' may be used in place of 'name', probably even having both is okay.* As long as they are the same. But using content-type for one is wrong. The http-equiv="Content-Type" really is intended for character encoding. And I noticed Pixelpost does that now by php header(which is better), so can actually be omitted in the meta section of the html.
*edit: It seems some search engines tend to see http-equiv=description/keywords as a spam tactic. And may not index you. (but I've also read the opposite on this somewhere, might be interesting to find out how google thinks about this?) Source: http://www.hisoftware.com/cc/searchability.htm#s41

I also just noticed that <IMAGE_NOTES_CLEAN> gets htmlspecialchars( ,ENT_QUOTES), and this causes notes with stuff like " I'm blahblah " to show up as:

I&_#039;m blahblah (without the _)

Is there any particular reason single quotes need to be removed from 'image_notes_clean'? The comments in the source actually say "// image notes without HTML tags and double quotes". But it's removing single quotes, not double quotes. Double quotes are removed with ENT_NOQUOTES. Small typo/bug/mistake?
*edit: pretty sure that's a small mistake, since the html starts with content="site-name etc, title, blah blah. And single quotes are not a problem, but a double quote would end the content="part like this->" if double quotes are used in a description..

[Dennis+]

Thanks mav, updated both things in SVN, so 1.6.1 will have this.

[Mav]

Great! (I assume it's the tags as keywords and the single/double quote thing you're referring to.)

I've tried to find out more about the http-equiv meta stuff tonight. Couldn't really find something at google about this, but from what I've read most people say that http-equiv="description" is wrong, and name="description" is correct, same goes for the keywords meta tag.

The default image_template.html uses <meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description"> however, and that's definitely not correct.