Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Thanks!
It would seem after the mandatory info needed to display the page, the title should be the first since it's the most important.
But what the heck to I know, my site has been on Google's "this site sucks so we aren't going to index it even though no other sites have this information and it has what you searched for" list since November 2004.
This is the order that I eventually settled on:
- Character encoding: "UTF-8"
- language: "en"
- title
- meta description
- meta keywords (if used)
- robots directive (if a negative)
- links to CSS files
- links to JS files
- anything else
Is it best to use nothing unless you don't want the robots to index and follow? Should I use "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW" on those pages instead of NONE?
I regularly use "noindex" to fix duplicate content issues, but rarely find a use for "nofollow".
But even if Google has improved, I still prefer to put the important stuff at the top of the HTML using css positioning. That way, if I think the visitor needs to see something else first on the page (like a form or some scripted thing-a-ma-bob) I still can have the important text at the top of the <body> section.
This is the order that I eventually settled on:
- Character encoding: "UTF-8"
- language: "en"
- title
- meta description
- meta keywords (if used)
- robots directive (if a negative)
- links to CSS files
- links to JS files
- anything else
Mine is very close to g1smd's with a change on the CSS and JS file order, and also the robots directive. I place the JS files before CSS since I use the @import method and this prevents the FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content) issues.
- Character Encoding ISO-8859-1
- robots directive (if a negative)
- title
- meta description
- meta keywords (if used)
- links to JS files
- links to CSS files
- anything else
The very first thing I want to serve is the character encoding. Then the robots directive. From there I want title, description and keywords. Next comes a link to the global js file. And then a link to the global css file. There are times where I might have additional js and css files which would come after the global files.
I'm one of those SOC (Source Ordered Content) groupies. ;)
Where do you specify the page language? I see that W3C now recommends to add it as an attribute to the <html> or <body> tag. I have always used a separate meta tag for that.
However I never managed to get the layout centered. So recently we relaunched that site, and I gave up the content-high-in-code concept in favour of a centered layout. I saw no difference in rankings before and after.
Ah-ha, but there is a way to center the design and still utilize Source Ordered Content. Utilize a containing div...
div.container{
position:relative;
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
width:95%;
}
Where do you specify the page language?
Custom HTTP Headers at the server level. I'm also considering moving all of my charset tags to a custom header. No need for the additional code on the pages.
I did an experiment over a few months, changing between standard table layout, content first table layout (yes, it is possible) and CSS content first.
Content first table layout came up ever so slightly higher than the other two on most searches that I was tracking.
When comparing CSS and standard table, standard table did a little better in searches for things in the H1 in the content, CSS did better for things in paragraphs in the content (long tail)
I have found almost no difference in the ranking based on the amount of HTML code in the file before the content. Copying the .css file info into the HEAD made no real difference.
This was all at least 18 months ago, so current mileage may vary.
My conclusion: put the page together however you want, using all the tools available to you. It just isn't worth the time or effort to worry about. Just make sure that your navigation is consistent enough that Google (and Y! and MSN) can figure out what is navigation and what is not.
Ah-ha, but there is a way to center the design and still utilize Source Ordered Content
I think that's what we did, but it clashed with absolute positioning. But I'll have a look at it again.
I'm also considering moving all of my charset tags to a custom header.
Sounds like an interesting concept. Why do you only "consider" it? And would the amount of data to transfer not be the same - so the pagesize gets smaller but the header gets larger. What is to win?
Most of the optimization was also done for perfect ad targeting at adsense
content
AdSense code
keywords for page
link to next page
link to prev page
link to prev chapter
link to next chapter
navigation links to same chapter
navigation links to thems on the site
navigation links to new articles, rss feeds, sitemap
navigation links to other theme oriented sub domains
The idea is to have the most relevant parts first
and the last relevant parts last
Sounds like an interesting concept. Why do you only "consider" it?
I've added the Content-Language custom header. I tried adding the Content-Type to set the charset and I'm not too certain that it worked. Since the validator through up an error that no character encoding was detected, I'd have to assume that I did something wrong or this is best left to a metadata element on the page? I've never really messed with the custom HTTP headers before in IIS, tis not my forte. ;)
But it's not "on-page", it's a server config.
...so basically if i wanted to use this i would have it configured on the server itself not on the codes of the page?
But it's not "on-page", it's a server config.
That's what concerns me about moving things from on-page to off-page (from the server).
I've given this some thought and am going to use my method of using an include in the <head> to populate my static metadata elements, the language and charset being two of them.
If I do this from the server, and that page is copied, those two elements are not going to travel with the page. I think it might be best if they stay on-page to prevent anything from breaking in the process.
Any comments from you server gurus on this one?
It is not good to have duplicate tags, once in the server header and again in the <head> section of the page.
will the tags be better on the server header or on the <head> section of the page?
Server header: 1%
Page header: 99%
Now we are switching this to:
Server header: 5%
Page header: 95%
The page size does decrease slightly, but the overall amount of data stays the same.
Am I missing something?
In the server header: where you can change everything for the whole site by editing one file, or in each individual page which makes the settings portable per page, but if ever needing to be edited means that every page needs to be edited.
I have seen sites place number 1 with NO head section at all, and I have seen them place number 1 with over 200 lines in the head section.
Which leads me to believe that whatever is in the HEAD, aside from maybe a couple of meta tags, is totally irrelevant as far as SEO goes.
So the content bot, the one that records text strings is able to find the text strings, it doesn't look at the code, the security (or others) look at the code.
[edited by: Reid at 1:26 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2006]
