META ATTRIBUTES - DOES ORDER MATTER!?!
-
Good Morning Mozers,
I am currently working with a developer on a new website and they've recently sent me some mock-ups. When I viewed the source, however, the order of the 'META' attributes was much different than any web page I've seen before.
From what it appears, the developer had placed 'mobile', 'cache expiration' and a number of other attributes much more highly than what I'm used to seeing the portion lead with, i.e. META description, META keywords, etc.
With that, my question for the community is: does the order of the META 'attributes' matter when developing a new website?
If you have (what appear to be) less important attributes placed closer to the beginning tag, does it make (what were previously considered the most 'relevant attributes) less important to the spiders when they come crawl the site?
Finally, what are the best META attributes and best method for constructing the meta portion of the code on a web page?
-
So I just asked this same question here because I couldn't find any answers from Mozzers on this topic. This was from 2 years ago. I've been finding conflicting advice on META order. It seems like best practice would be to have title before keywords. AM I wrong?
-
It doesn't matter for the main tags - title and description.
However this guy feels the position of the Content Type meta tag does matter, so you might want to consider that.
http://news.smartlabsoftware.com/2008/11/17/meta-tag-order-does-matter/
-
As long as you have the correct syntax and it is all in the of the document there is no negative or positive effect on the positioning of the META elements in regards to SEO.
As for the best META elements to include for an SEO benefit - that would be your title and description tags.
Hope this helped! - Kyle
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is Google displaying meta descriptions for pages that are nowhere contained in said page metas?
Certain search keywords are pulling up incorrect page titles and meta descriptions for our site. I've looked through our code, and the text used by Google in the search results is nowhere found inside our site. I've also looked at previous iterations of our site from over a decade ago and still haven't found it. I then searched specifically for the exact phrased incorrect meta descriptions and found a long list of spammy sites linking to our domain with the exact, incorrect meta description. Is this why Google is displaying the incorrect data, and how do I get Google to use the meta descriptions from my actual site?
Web Design | | Closetstogo0 -
No cache meta tags - does it help Google get back and reindex faster?
I saw these meta tags on a site and am trying to figure out their benefit. These meta tags are on the home page, product pages, every page of the site. Will it cause search engine bots to come back and index pages faster? Will it cause slower page loading in browsers if nothing is cached? http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"/> http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache,no-store,must-revalidate"/> http-equiv="expires" content="0"/>
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Page missing meta description some times a good thing?
Just courious to why http://moz.com/learn/seo does not appear to have the meta tag: name="description" content=""> Is this purposely done this way for some reason? Or has it become less important? Just curious.
Web Design | | DanielMulderNL0 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
Auto-Generated META tag on 404 Page
I'm currently creating a 404 error page for my site and I noticed that a similar site uses some sort of code to automatically generate a meta title. Is this useful? For instance type in electrolux.com/john This page does not exist but in the title you'll see John | Electrolux How can i do this on my site?
Web Design | | evacuumstoreSEO0 -
Meta Title and Description for click through optimization
I have a few years experience optimizing PPC text for click-through and conversion rates. I don't see many web sites that are using these methods for their organic listings generated from meta tags. Why is this? So many meta tags seem to be either keyword stuffed or auto generated. From my research, it seems that keywords in meta tags mean little to search engine optimization other than the fact that vertically aligning keywords from search phrase to listing to landing page is important. (Just like it is in PPC). Now that I am personally doing more than just PPC, I have begun rewriting meta text for increased conversions. The search results look to me like My web site is the only one doing this. Is everyone missing out on something, or am I missing something?
Web Design | | EugeneF0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0 -
Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?
HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g; /75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
Web Design | | GardenBeet
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name? The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??0