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Webnauts
04-06-2003, 16:07/04:07PM
I would to ask here, if someone can have a look at the Meta-Tags of my website:

http://www.webnauts-akademie.de

and tell me if there are any possible improvements necessary for my ranking at Google.

Thanks in advance for your kind support!!!

Greetings,

John
ihelpyou
04-06-2003, 16:55/04:55PM
Welcome to the forums Webnauts! :hi:

Meta tags mean very little anymore. The title tag is important but I cannot read yours. :) I can't help you much at all as I cannot read your page.
Quadrille
05-06-2003, 07:08/07:08AM
Meta tags count for little in terms of ranking, but they can influence what the reader sees in their search results - though that is not consistent or predictable!.

So it pays to have an accurate TITLE tag, and a useful DESCRIPTION tag, in case the search chooses to display it. For the same reason, it pays to have the first text on the page saying something useful, even if that's an ALT tag. (You'd be amazed how many search results say "This site uses frames" or "If you want to see this rubbish, first spend 20 minutes resetting your browser".

You seem to have ended many of your META tags with"/", which is new to me - does that help?

To summarise, META tags don't necessarily help a lot - but a bad META tag can be used against you!
MarkEG
05-06-2003, 07:30/07:30AM
Hi I noticed that you have made your page with XHTML
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de">

I found that dreamweaver MX puts in the / at the end of the tags if you let it.

I take these out as I believe that the tags work better without.

and just end my tags like this

...residents</title>

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Good luck

Mark
MarkEG
05-06-2003, 07:36/07:36AM
Actually that is how I end my Title tag...

the other tags I use just end with "> as below

......travelers,europe,policies">

Cheers

Mark
g1smd
05-06-2003, 14:09/02:09PM
Valid XHTML requires that all tags are ended. No problem with:
<table> ... </table> and <p> ... </p> and <b> ... </b> and so on.

However for tags that do not have an ending you have to add one like:
<br /> or <img src="name.png" alt="words" /> and so on. It isn't valid XHTML without the ending. You need a space before the / otherwise some browsers choke on the code.

However, just slapping some ending tags on the code and adding an XML NameSpace declaration does not make a valid XHTML page. Theree are issues as to the MIME type used to serve the document, and there are problems if the code is not fully validated.

In my opinion, you would be better to stick to HTML 4.01 Transitional instead. It avoids a lot of messing about, and potential browser issues.
steelcityinternet
05-06-2003, 14:26/02:26PM
Stick to keywords and description, all the others dont do anything for you as far as your ranking goes - Google doesn't even use these for ranking, although Inktomi does so it's worth leaving them in - I dont think they count for much though.
Robots automatically index and follow pages so there's not really any need for that tag. Robots also revisit whenever they feel like it, so the revisit tag is unnecessary.
g1smd
06-06-2003, 15:12/03:12PM
For your page to actually be valid you MUST declare the character encoding used for the page, with something like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

There are also other schemes such as UTF-8 and many others,





It is also a good idea to declare what language the page is in, using:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="EN-GB">

The language and country codes come from ISO 4217 and ISO 3166.





You do need the meta description tag, and it is useful but not vital to have a meta keywords tag:

<meta name="Description" content=" Your Description Here. ">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" your, keyword, list, here ">





You document should begin with a !DOCTYPE and a title element:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title> Your Title Here </title>





The last parts of your header should have your links to external style sheets and external javascript files:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" src="/path/file.css">

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>

</head>
<body>