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Meta Tags - Does Order Matter?

IntegrityWebDev

8:14 pm on Jul 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm more of a coder, a friend I work with is more of an SEO/marketing guy.

Both of us know that Meta Tags are only one tiny part of the SEO equation but he thinks that the title, keywords and description should come right after the <HEAD> tag, Generally I have a content type right after the head tag, then the others. My content types look like the one below.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

My question is, does it matter? Should the content type come first or the others, or does it even matter at all?

Thanks,
Chris

g1smd

9:27 pm on Jul 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

The character encoding should be first. At least one old browser had problems displaying special characters in the title if the encoding was defined later.

Next you need the title and meta description. I haven't use the meta keywords element for many years.

Next place your links to CSS files and then finally place any links to js files. There are solid reasons why links to js should be last. I'll see if I can find the article that talks about that.

topr8

9:42 pm on Jul 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

i use meta keywords to confuse my less savvy competitors!

Novus

1:48 pm on Jul 20, 2011 (gmt 0)

Last year I had a interview with a digital marketing company, the digital manager went out of his way to to show me coding stratagy in which hes placed his meta tags at the very top, to be fair he had success with his pages in the serps from what I could see. However I would put them as close to the top as possible without compromising the coding.

IntegrityWebDev

4:11 pm on Jul 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks for all the replies, I think at least in the code i do I will keep the character encoding first. :-)

phranque

12:51 am on Jul 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

i typically specify the encoding (content type) first, the the meta robots, then title and meta description.