Header weirdness. Keyword and Desc..

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Header weirdness. Keyword and Desc..

Cap..no caps..works doesn..argh

johnwards

4:51 pm on Feb 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

I am using the spider sim [searchengineworld.com ] to check out my site to make sure my keyword and description tags are working. But the don't seem to be apearing.

Here is what I have in my header.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<titleMy Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="Word Word Word Word Word Word Word Word, Word Word Word Word Word Word Word Word" />
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Word Word, Word Word, Word Word, Word Word, Word, Word, Word Word, Word" />
</head>

Now of course I am not doing a site about "Word" but I wasn't sure if my post would be edited with my original head tags in.

Can anyone spot why spider sim is not picking up the head tags?

Cheers folks
John

DrDoc

6:01 pm on Feb 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

Welcome to Webmaster World!

Maybe it's just a typo -- but your title tag is missing the right bracket ">"
Does Sim Spider display the meta information at all? Have you tried putting other sites through Sim Spider?

g1smd

11:15 pm on Feb 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

Ha!

Do a Google search for something like:

meta name="description" content=

and discover thousands of other sites that have similar such typos in their <head> section, which, in most cases, has totally messed with their ranking in more normal SERPs.

encyclo

12:22 am on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

A missing > on the title means that a spider won't read a good chunk of the header. The same problem can happen in your body text too and can mean that a spider is unable to read a chunk or your content - maybe including all your juicy keywords. You can spend hours fiddling with your keyword density but a minor mistake with a tag and its all for nothing.

Your page isn't valid even without the typo on the title tag. As you're using XHTML, all the tags should be lower case, including meta tags. The robots meta tag is missing it's trailing slash as well (or you could delete it - it has no effect as you're allowing everything - which is the default). There has been concern in the past (but little evidence) that XHTML-style meta tags (ie with trailing slashes) caused problems for some spiders. Personally, I prefer HTML 4.01 over XHTML, but that's another topic.

[validator.w3.org...] should be the first address you visit when optimizing for the search engines. ;)

johnwards

9:27 am on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

The missing > was a typo when taking out my actual title for posting on here.

Not really sure what the problem was to be honest but I think it might have had something to do with the xhtml. I descided to validate it and it complained about <meta not being valid in the DTD or something.

I changed the DTD to 4.01 transitonal and it seems to be fixed now.

Cheers
John

DrDoc

3:49 pm on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

The validation problem is related to this line:

...which should be:

...in XHTML

SuzyUK

4:04 pm on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Word Word, Word Word, Word Word, Word Word, Word, Word, Word Word, Word" />

While the one of the correct (XHTML) ways to close an "empty" element is <meta name....etc /> (space backslash closing tag) apparently the sim spider doesn't like this.. wether or not SE spiders feel the same way I don't know

solution when I came across it was to use the other way to close an XHTML element

Suzy