This week I’m going to focus on a lesser known set of built in Meta Tag extensions for MindTouch Deki. The Meta Tag extensions allow you to add information into the header of MindTouch Deki like keywords, description, author information, and more. I’m going to focus on a couple of common use cases that Meta Tags are beneficial for:

In support I’m often asked the following question: “I want to add my site to Google Webmaster Tools but they need me to verify that I own the site.” Google gives two options to do this 1) upload an html file into the root directory or 2) add a custom Meta Tag to the site header. Uploading an html file or adding a keyword typically requires FTP or Shell access. With MindTouch Deki we simplify it by allowing you to add custom Meta tag extensions through the WYSIWYG Editor.

In the case of adding a Meta Tag so that you can have ownership of a site you would do the following:

1. Edit your MindTouch Deki HomePage and click on the Cog icon to open the Extension dialog
2. Click on Built in Functions and scroll down to meta.custom
3. The name is the meta name that Google includes, something like verify-v1
4. The content would be the long alpha numeric string from the Google code
5. Insert it and save the page, then go back to Google and verify

The actual extension will look something like this (content is skewed):

{{ meta.custom{name: "verify-v1", content: "fdshjfhdsjkhfjkdshjkfdsafkdshakfhdksa543245"} }}

Another good use for the Meta Tags is to add keywords and descriptions for your MindTouch Deki pages. This helps with SEO of your MindTouch Deki site. You can do so by going into the Extension dialog again through the editor and selecting meta.keywords or meta.description under the Built In category. This can be done on a per page basis.

Here is an example of a meta keyword and description DekiScript:

{{ meta.keywords{content: "blog, testing"} }}
{{ meta.description{content: "This is a test page about meta tags"} }}

This functionality is currently available in all MindTouch Deki downloads Release 1.9.1 and higher and will be available in Wik.is after the next upgrade which will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

To read more about the supported Meta extensions in MindTouch Deki check out the Meta Functions specs.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/support