iWeb HTML codes (META TAGS) - - - ADVANCED USERS

Okay, so alot of people have been asking how to setup META tags for Google and other sites. Apple's official stance is that this is not supported by them since you need third party applications to edit the code, here is a way to get this done, but be aware that if this does not work you can only republish your site since Apple will not resolve a manual coding issue.

-First you need a third party application to edit the code, like TextMate.
-You need to open your Welcome page with this editor
--If you use .Mac you would open this from iDisk>Web>Sites>(Your site name)>Welcome page.html
--if you publish to another host then you would edit this after publishing to a folder, the welcome.html file will be in the folder

-Once you see this file, you right click, otherwise known as Control + Click this file
-When the white menu appears select "Open With" and select the HTML editor, in this example we are referring to TextMate

-When this opens it will open in a white window with all the HTML code, ANYTHING changed here will effect your page, please be careful not to delete information.

-Copy Google's META tags and insert them where they recommend that they go. Typically this goes within the <head> and </head> tags

-Once this is done you will notice that the Red dot in the upper left corner has a dark circle in it indicating that if you attempt to close this you will be prompted to save this page. Once saved the META tags should work with Google

**HOWEVER, VERY IMPORTANT. If you decide to change your Welcome page in the future you will need to publish this site again which will remove everything you just did, so either leave the Welcome page alone, or restart this process after the publish has been completed.

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Apr 30, 2008 7:33 AM

Reply
6 replies

May 3, 2008 11:43 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom - is it possible to augment the tags via a snippet? The tags are in the head section and snippets get plugged into the body section, so I'm guessing this is not possible... But, I thought I was ask anyway.

The TextEdit solution isn't working for me - my site has way too many pages and the pages are constantly being updated. One of these days I'll learn how to use the Automater app, there's probably a solution in their somewhere.

Ideally Apple would allow us to edit the tags for each page. That would be an infinitely better solution. Hey Apple - Hint, hint, hint! 🙂

May 3, 2008 6:03 PM in response to My_Monster_G5

It can be done, you can manipulate just about anything in http://www.w3.org/DOM/>DOM.
I have been doing all this time with javascript, but I don't know about meta tags... because javascript/AJAX change the page after it started to load.

So the question is will the search engine come back and read the page? after AJAX redo the page?

Just for kick, I just wrote a javascript to add meta tags to the head element, I will see in about a week if google index it and show the description of my page:
http://hdl.50webs.com/Home/Welcome.html

You won't see the code in the page source, but you will see it in DOM Inspector.

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iWeb HTML codes (META TAGS) - - - ADVANCED USERS

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