I have a customer who recently asked me to perform some minor text changes to a site which someone else created. Once I got into the files, I started finding all kinds of weird things in the code. For example, all the meta tags, including the keywords meta tag, have been placed in the BODY of the page instead of in the HEAD section, which is where I was taught to put them.
I am trying to convince my customer that this needs to be changed -- that I need to move the meta tags into the HEAD section.
Unfortunately, the original creator of the site did not use a template approach, so I can't just make this change in a template which will then update the whole site. I have to go into each individual page on the site to make this change, which will be rather time-consuming.
Customer is reluctant to authorize this work. His attitude is, "The site looks fine and seems to be working, so why should I pay you to do this unnecessary work?If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
But I am wondering... is it "broke" or not? Will those meta tags actually work properly when placed in the BODY? Will search engine spiders be able to understand and use the keywords meta tag if it's in the BODY instead of the HEAD? Or will the spiders ignore the keywords meta tag because it is in the wrong place?
My customer does care about search engine rankings, so if I can state with confidence that the meta tags placed in the BODY are not working to help SE spiders index the site, then my customer will probably agree to pay me to relocate those meta tags into the HEAD section of each page. However, I don't know if that's true -- so I'm asking you folks at Experts Exchange to advise me about this.
Thanks for your help. I'm not at all sure what kind of points to assign -- this may be an easy answer for many experts, but it's perplexing to me, so I'm going to put "moderately difficult."
Teresa Ritter
Start Free Trial
