Checklist for website

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Checklist for website

checklist

ebizdude

8:34 am on Sep 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

hello
I am setting up my site
I have 200 pages of content.

I have dsigned it in SIMPLE html.
only left and right links I am calling from .txt file

I have tried to keep the use of tables to minimum.
(infact do tables affect rankings)

I have used alt tags.
I have listed meta tags in the order below.

Can someone plz tell me if I have missed on anything..

also lets make a CHECKLIST for other users.... what do u say?

deejay

1:06 pm on Sep 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi ebizdude

First, no, tables don't affect rankings either positively or negatively in their own right.

But you CAN use the 'table trick' to help lift your page content higher in the code, which can help rankings.

On your header tags, I'd keep title, keywords, description and language... perhaps robots if you don't want to use a robots file for some reason... but the rest of the tags are irrelevant for most situations - you could get rid of them with no disadvantage.

encyclo

2:55 pm on Sep 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

deejay is quite right: you appear to be heavily over-meta-tagged - most of what you have posted can be got rid of.

If we go through the list:

<title></title>

- KEEP - this one's vital

<meta name="description" content="">

- KEEP - Definitely useful

<meta name="keywords" content="">

- KEEP - Possibly useful for Yahoo, otherwise harmless (but don't go overboard)

Note: I've corrected the missing quote marks after the words description and keywords.

<meta NAME="" content="">

- DELETE

<meta NAME="abstract" CONTENT="">

- DELETE

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="EN-GB">

- REPLACE - add the language to the html element above, giving

<html lang="en">

. Unless you're targeting a specifically British audience, just use the en rather than the en-gb.

<meta NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">

<meta NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="10 days">

<meta NAME="copyright" CONTENT="">

<meta NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">

<meta NAME="Reply-To" CONTENT="">

<meta NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Namo WebEditor v4.0">

<meta NAME="Rating" CONTENT="General">

<meta name="resource-type" content="document">

- DELETE all of them. They're all useless. Only place a robots meta tag if you want to exclude robots - they all index and follow by default.

Finally, make sure you validate your pages:

[validator.w3.org...]

That will help you avoid problems - for example, you need to define your character encoding, either in the HTTP header or in a meta tag. Currently, it's not clear that you do so.

jo1ene

1:12 am on Sep 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

Spellcheck, spellcheck, spellcheck!
And make sure you have well thought out titles on each page. No repeats!

[searchengineworld.com...]

ebizdude

6:23 am on Sep 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

thnaks for answering..

so u r saying to delele these
<meta NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">
<meta NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="10 days">
<meta NAME="copyright" CONTENT="">
<meta NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">
<meta NAME="Reply-To" CONTENT="">
<meta NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Namo WebEditor v4.0">
<meta NAME="Rating" CONTENT="General">
<meta name="resource-type" content="document">

BUT is there any hram if i have them there.

also what is this validator? Do i put
<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM> in all pages...

tedster

6:32 am on Sep 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

Is there any harm? Just wasted bandwidth and pushing your content further down the HTML document.

For the DTD, use one of these:
[w3.org...]

To start, most likely this one, for HTML 4.01 transitional:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

A decent thread here about it all:
What's doctype all about? [webmasterworld.com]

ebizdude

6:37 am on Sep 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

which one do i put
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

or this one

<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>
<html>

encyclo

10:13 am on Sep 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

Neither ;)

As tedster mentioned, the best doctype is almost certainly this one:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Reid

10:27 am on Sep 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

I am on a server which has no robots.txt file and does not allow me to put one in the root directory.
I found that using a robots meta tag on all my pages got rid of a pesky 404 error code

file not found: robots.txt

I don't know if this makes any real difference to the robots but watching the 404 errors ticking up faster than my hit counter was kind of unnerving.