0: in my tags

<0:keywords>

[fred_bloggs]

Hi, I have a website that ranks no1 in most search engines , recently I noticed that my meta tags all contain a 0 and colon like so <0:keywords> there is also a zero and colon in the closing tags.
Does anyone know how this got here and what it means?
I originally built the site with Word but now use Dreamweaver, I can also hand code html at a push.
I was going to remove them but would like to know if this is wise, given that I already rank no1 for my target keyphrase.

Thanks

[DrDoc]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! [WebmasterWorld.com]

I originally built the site with Word

That's the answer. Word adds all sorts of junk to your code, which is why I'm sure you will find several other instances of code bloat.

As far as I know, you should be able to remove those tags, as they are not valid HTML anyway, and not used by the SEs. They are used by Word internally when (and if) editing your site with Word.

But, you may want someone else to confirm this anyway.

[saucey]

And Dreamweaver will even do it for you.

Commands / Clean up Word HTML

And it Shouldn't have any affect on your rankings, but... sometimes the "if it ain't broken..." saying is a good rule of thumb. :)

[fred_bloggs]

Well thats the crux of the problem.....Should I let sleeping dogs lie. You see I would like to add some valid and readable keywords as sugested by a well known keyword optimisation tool and be found for them also. At the moment I am only number one for one keyword phrase. Presumably that is a result of some fortuitous spidering, it does not generate much traffic though.

I have assumed that my great placement in Google was the result of a manual entry by them, as the invalid <0:description> tag I have, is shown in Google's search results as something else.

Thanks.

[edited by: encyclo at 5:15 pm (utc) on April 4, 2006]
[edit reason] no specifics please, see terms of service [/edit]