Hi, I have lost a lot all of my seo power recently when I had a glitch on my site and had to revert back to some old backup files. I am using various seo analysis sites to help find the culprit that is causing my seo crash, and was surprised when I saw this error on one site HTML Header Meta Description (missing) Length: 0 Meta Keywords (empty) Length: 0 Meta Robots (empty) Encoding (missing) I have checked my header.ctp and public, and I see the meta description and keywords. I am not sure what the meta robots is, but can anyone else see something that I am missing? Here's my script: [/B] [B] <!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> <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us" /> <h1><title>My awesome site</title></h1> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http:// r e n t a l o l o g y . net/favicon.ico" /> <link href="https://plus.google.com/numbersrel="publisher" /> <meta name="msvalidate.01" content="numbers" /> <meta name="Description" content="Awesome words here"> <meta name="Keywords" content="Awesome words here too"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/look.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/jquery.lightbox-0.5.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/slider.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/skin.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/jquery-ui.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/facebox.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/rating.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/frontend/development-bundle/themes/base/jquery.ui.all.css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery-1.4.2.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/faceBox/facebox.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery-lightbox-0.5/js/jquery.lightbox-0.5.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="/js/slider.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.jcarousel.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/watwrmark.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.validate.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/rating.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/ui.datepicker.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/common.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.maskedinput.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/multiple.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.autocomplete.js"></script> <!--script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'numbers', 'my site'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script--> <!-- Go to www.addthis.com/dashboard to customize your tools --> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=ra-53dab9c92f8116e8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.rentalology.net/ckeditor/ckeditor.js"></script> <script src='/google_analytics_auto.js'></script></head> <body> <div id="main"> <!--mainContainer--> <div id="mainContainer"> <!--container--> <div id="container"> <!-- !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> <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://my site/favicon.ico" /> <title>awesome words</title> <meta name="Description" content="awesome words."> <meta name="Keywords" content="words" --> <div id="header"> <!--headerFst--> <div class="headerFst"> <div class="welcomeCntnr"> <ul> <li><span class="font-wieght">WELCOME</span>, GUEST</li> <li>|</li> <li> <a href="/members/usertype_option">REGISTER</a> </li> <li>|</li> <!--<li></li>--> <li><a href="/members/log-in">LOGIN</a></li> <li>|</li> <li><a href="/faqs">HELP</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> <!--headerFst--> <div style="float:right; margin-top:10px;"> <!-- Go to www.addthis.com/dashboard to customize your tools --> <div class="addthis_horizontal_follow_toolbox"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> (function() { var po = document.createElement("script"); po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true; po.src = "https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js?publisherid=numbers1"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })(); </script> </div> <!--logoNavContnr--> <div class="logoNavContnr" style=""> <!--logo--> <div class="logo" style="float:left;"> <a href="/"><img src="/img/rental.png" alt="" /></a> [/B][/SIZE] Code (markup):
Hi, a couple of comments. First you should not have those h1 tags in the header. h1 tags belong in the body. They don't do anything in the header and they could be causing the error. So lose the h1 tags around your title tag. Save then for the on-page title of your page in the body section. Second, the meta robots is referring to a meta robots tag with follow or nofollow attributes. Not really needed if you have a well designed robots.txt file, I still use it though. META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW" Your Keywords tag will no longer do anything for you in SEO, all search engines ignore that tag but it is still a good place to store the actual keywords you are using for that page as a reminder.
Mr. Pierson!...Thank you for your insight!! I rewrote my meta keywords & description, and it seemed to fix the MIA issue. Though I can not pin point which character missing caused this issue. (For anyone else who may have a similar issue, using IE page source on a comparable website helped.) Thank you so much for pointing out my H1 issue. That was truly kind of you! Especially, since I was unaware that is not considered good seo practice. Someone else had originally tied my H1 to my logo with an alt attribute, because I really have no title on my website, but I accidentally deleted it recently. Perhaps you can help me on how to add the H1 to this image?: My html: <!--logo--> <div class="logo" style="float:left;"> <?php echo $html->link($html->image('rental_logonew.png'),array('controller'=>'homes','action'=>'index'),array('escape'=>false)); ?> </div> <div class="logo" style="float: right; margin-right: 470px; padding-top: 40px;"> <?php /* echo $html->link($html->image('free-join.png'),array('controller'=>'homes','action'=>'index'),array('escape'=>false)); */ ?> <img src="/img/free-join.png" alt=advertise your vacation rental free"> </div> <!--logo--> Code (markup): My CSS: div.logo /*changed 28june*/ { float: left; width: 200px; padding-bottom:10px; } And my CSS Look code: /* css */ #logo { background: transparent url("http://mywebsite.net/img/rental_logonew.png") no-repeat scroll 0% 0%; float: left; /*width: 200px;*/ padding-bottom:10px; text-indent: -3333px; border: 0; margin: 0; } #logo a { display: block; width: 280px; /* larger than actual image? */ height: 120px; text-decoration: none; border: 0; } Code (markup):
Hi, the H1 tag should only be used on text and it should be on the main title for the page (in the body, not the head). It will do no good on an image, waste of time. The H in H1 stands for Heading, there are also H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags. You usually use the H1 tag for the title of the page and H2 for section headings, but always on text and always in the body section. If your page does not have a heading sentence then maybe you should consider putting one in, for instance if your page is about Dog Training then you could have as the first line of text on the page "Dog Training Techniques" and put your H1 tags around that line. If you don't like the size that the H1 tag makes the text you can put css formatting inside of the H1 tags.
Thanks again George for your advice. I have read that using a logo as a H1 is controversial in the seo world. Since it is, I am going to take your advice and add something in the body as suggested to make my H1. Thanks so much!!
PS- I am not sure what is with those ugly green smiley icons...that was supposed to be a simple smiley face, and not so scary looking..haha.
Hi leftysgirl, I am not sure about that smiling icon either, that is all I have been seeing recently on this forum. Maybe there is a glitch in the programming. On using h1, here is a basic layout using my example of a dog training site (visible text in the body section of the page): Top 10 Techniques for Dog Training (this would be in the h1 tag, only use one h1 tag per page) a paragraph or 2 with great content goes here Using Treats to Help Train Your Dog (this would be a new section and would be in a h2 tag) a paragraph or 2 with great content goes here Using Playtime to Support and Reinforce Your Dog's Learning (this would be a new section and would be in another h2 tag) The basic idea, the main subject is your page title and that is the h1 The page is then broken down into several more sub-sections using h2 tags. This makes it easier for people to read the page and easier for the search engines to understand the page.
Thanks George for the information. I have tried adding a H1 title tag to the body of my public.ctp file, and my new title floated to my header. I believe since I am using CakePhp, I may need to add some code to my look.css file in order to get the title positioned where I want it, but I am not certain. I am not a professional...wish I was!