Waldek Mastykarz - Innovation Matters | SharePoint Server MVP

Including meta tags for pages on Internet-facing websites is very important. Additional information included in meta tags makes it easier for search engines to find and classify the content. Still many websites either don’t use meta tags at all or don’t provide content editors with a simple mechanism for managing the meta tags making managing the meta tags a one-time process. In many situations meta tags are not even a part of the information architecture for Internet-facing websites and are easily being forgotten in the development process. Additionally, as they are not being displayed on the screen, they are not a part of the branding what makes it challenging for the developers to provide an intuitive editing interface for. Mavention Meta Fields is a turn-key solution that allows you to easily add support for managing page-level meta tags even if your website is almost ready to go on-line. Read more »

The new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools ship with Replaceable Parameters which allow you to provide values for SharePoint solution items whose actual values are not known at the design time. And while the Replaceable Parameters are without a doubt a great improvement in the development process, there is one problem with them: there are quite a few of them and looking up the right one might get you out of element when developing. And this is exactly where Mavention Replaceable Parameters Snippets come in. Read more »

Proper usage of headings is very important on the web. It helps you structure your content making it more readable, it makes it easier for visually challenged readers to navigate through the content and helps you optimize your content for search engines. And while it’s so important, it’s quite surprising that there is no standard mechanism available within SharePoint that would allow you to quickly verify that your page has a valid headings structure. However thanks to the great extensibility of SharePoint it’s history: proudly presenting Mavention Scan Page Headings! Read more »

Hyperlinks are a great feature of web publishing. Using hyperlinks you can easily link from one page to another providing the reader with information from different, and often also independent, sources. However as soon as you include a hyperlink in your content, the external content becomes a part of your page: not physically, but virtually. People reading your page expect your links to work because they assume that you wanted to provide them some additional information relevant to the page they reading. So knowing that, there is nothing bad as broken links in your content. In some situations you might get to hear from your visitors that some links don’t work, but wouldn’t it be better if you could find out about it first? Doing it manually can get very time consuming, but why bother if you can do it automatically using Mavention Scan Page for Broken Links? Read more »

Earlier this year Yoast wrote an interesting article about how including a Table of Contents (TOC) for longer articles can help you drive traffic to your content from search engines. While there are some plugins available for other Content Management Systems, that help you with generating TOC for your pages, if your website is hosted on SharePoint, you still have to insert the Table of Contents manually. At least you had to, because now you can do this automatically using the Mavention Insert Table of Contents solution. Read more »