Site Description in Browser

[dakwegmo+]

Originally Posted by Mav

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.

I'd love to hear what you find out about using the META tags for SEO, but from what I can tell the templates are correct. I read the specification and can't find where it would indicate they are wrong: http-equiv and name are both valid attributes of the meta tag, "content-type" is a valid value for the http-equiv attribute, and "description" is a valid value for the name attribute, so there's no problem there. Also, I think if it were wrong, the w3c would throw an error when you validate, but it doesn't even give a warning.

[Mav]

Yes, on itself they are both correct. But not when used in the same meta line, like this: <meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description" content="blah" />.

Content-type is intended just for that, to indicate a character set and content type. Like this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />.

On that w3c page it does say this:
http-equiv = name [CI]; This attribute may be used in place of the name attribute.
I think this is a little misleading and makes one think you can use <meta http-equiv="description"... instead of <meta name="description"... or even both in the same meta line. But it's just to indicate there are some meta tags that use 'name, and some that use 'http-equiv' instead (See this w3c page).

To understand the difference between the two better, you've got to know what the purpose is of "http-equiv" and "name":
Http-equiv implies a "HTTP response header", like content-type, refresh, expires, cache-control. These are html headers and can also be used with the header() function in php (Which is recommended over the use of meta tags).
The name implies "meta information", which are not real HTTP headers, but just additional info on the page itself, these can't be set with php's header() function.

Difference between using the meta http-equiv and the php header() function is that php actually sends out the headers first before any content, so the browser already knows what it's going to receive (in case of content-type for example). And with meta the browser it retrieves the page and adjusts or resets after it has read the meta header. Note that you can send a php or http-equiv header with a customname and variable("keywords=blah, etc" for example), but it would be a HTTP header. And is probably not looked at by search engines.

Most meta tags are ignored by search engines though, only keywords, description and the robots tag seem to be used mostly. And on a lot of sites they recommend a robots.txt file too.

Notes by w3c
Found a long list of meta tags here: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/
This seems like a nice article on the basic SEO stuff: http://www.kdwebpagedesign.com/seo.asp

Damn, this took a little longer than expected hehe. But it was interesting enough to figure this out, hope I didn't make it too confusing.

[dakwegmo+]

I see what you're saying. The W3C specification doesn't do a very good job of making it clear that the two should not be used together. I think that may be why the validator doesn't pick up the problem.