Hello, does it matter which order you place the title and meta tags in the head? <head> <title>....</title> <meta..> </head> vs. <head> <meta..> <title>....</title> </head> I know both work and it shouldnt matter but would it help if the spider read the title first? thank you
Not really from an SEO perspective. The differences (if any) would be so minor that they wouldn't even matter.
The order shouldnt matter from a validation POV. In the old days, ie 1997, you could put the keyphrase BEFORE any html tag, at the very top of the document, and it would help. This 'prominence' resulted in the very first thing being read by the search engine was the keyphrase. Those days are long gone. I havent seen that technique utilized since 2000. How soon the keyphrase appears on the page may have a very small effect on your results on ranking pages. Many feel it has no effect at all. Some feel that google uses the DOM to determine the 'content area' of the page (ie, it knows where the navigation is visually, not based on where it is in the code of the document), and therefore you should place the target keyphrase early within the content area......the place where people READ the document in the browser. Have a good prominence there. And, when possible, it is good practice to avoid superfluous meta tags, and to put CSS and Javascript into external includes. That's my opinion on the subject. Realize that the order of the title and meta should not be a real factor in your ranking achievements, but quality inbound links will have a much stronger effect.