Question: First I see assorted versions in both caps and small letters in the HEAD , TITLE, META NAME for KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION etc. When I check out the source code of various sites with good listings I don’t see a consistent set version. Even the “html” or “HTML” at the top varies on different sites. Even the experts seem to disagree. What works best in your opinion? Some site’s code starts with the Title then Description followed by the Keywords while others start with the Title followed by the Keywords and then the Description or other variations. What do you think is the best layout for SEO?
Answer: This is a great question because it allows me to address an important issue – keyword prominence. The term “keyword prominence” refers to how high up on a page a set of keyword phrases appears. Keyword prominence is something that is measured by all of the major search engines.
However, this question also raises another issue – tag order. In some cases, the order in which you place your HTML tags can affect search engine visibility. In other cases, it has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
For this particular reader question, I can give a direct answer. The order in which you place your HTML tags between the
and tags has no effect on search engine positions.
For example, using a fictional tea site, this presentation of HTML tags:
<html>
<head>
<title>Herbal tea from TranquiliTeas Organic Teas</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Buy gourmet herbal teas at wholesale prices from TranquiliTeas. Organic tea importer offers decaffeinated herbal teas and herbal tea blends. Black, oolong, green, and iced tea available as loose tea or in tea bags.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”organic herbal teas gourmet decaffeinated herbal tea bags Tranquiliteas black oolong green loose tea”>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
will not rank higher than this presentation of HTML tags, if the rest of the content remains identical:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”organic herbal teas gourmet decaffeinated herbal tea bags Tranquiliteas black oolong green loose tea”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Buy gourmet herbal teas at wholesale prices from TranquiliTeas. Organic tea importer offers decaffeinated herbal teas and herbal tea blends. Black, oolong, green, and iced tea available as loose tea or in tea bags.”>
<title>Herbal tea from TranquiliTeas Organic Teas</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The reason for this is that a web page should have only one title tag. (Or at least it should. Do not hire any search engine marketer who tells you to use multiple title tags on a single web page.) A web page should only have one meta-description and one meta-keywords tag. The order in which they are presented has no bearing on search engine positioning.
So I would tell you to use the tag order in which you are comfortable. Personally? I use the order shown in the first example, because that is the tag order I have used for years.
Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret that many search engine marketers use. Sometimes, we like to put things that have absolutely nothing to do with how well a page ranks on web pages just to mess with competitors. I am one of those people. Sometimes, I will put commas in unusual places in the meta-keywords tag just to mess with people because I know comma placement just isn’t that important. In fact, the meta-keywords tag isn’t really as important as it used to be.
HTML tag order becomes more important when you get to the content between the <body> and </body> tags. The search engines will view keyword phrases as prominent if they see that they are closer to the <body> tag than the </body> tag. The reason for this is that the content closer to the tag is most likely to be “above the fold,” the first screen that site visitors will view when they land on a page.
In an effort to get keyword-rich content closer to the <body> tag, many search engine marketers rely on Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layers. It’s a neat trick, you might think on the surface. In reality, it is not going to have any bearing because CSS layers rely on X, Y and Z coordinates. All of the software engineers at the search engines know that the upper, left hand corner of a browser window has the X,Y coordinates of (0,0). So when they deal with CSS layers, they know that content in the layer closest to the <body> tag might not be the content that appears at the top of the screen, and they accommodate for those differences.
(Does CSS layering bring back memories about things you had to learn in your junior high and high school classes that you’d never thought you’d use in your adult life? Image map coding also amuses me in the same way.)
So just be aware that in some cases, the HTML tag order is not important. And in other cases, it is important. A truly qualified search engine marketer understands how to code HTML and knows how various tags and scripts affect search engine spiders.
Shari Thurow is Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc., a full-service search engine marketing, web and graphic design firm. This article is excerpted from her book, Search Engine Visibility (http://www.searchenginesbook.com) published in January 2003 by New Riders Publishing Co. Shari can be reached at shari@grantasticdesigns.com.
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