advice from webmasters please !

[markmarkymark]

Yo !

A silly query - but here I go ...

I have noted that some sites choose to split their meta head tags up such that you have :

title tag

script / Style sheet info

Description Tag
Meta names tag.....

Is there any reason for this - does it spider better with the search engines? I would have thought the opposite would be true??

just wondered if this was a trick or something?

thanks

Mark

[SMHarman]

I believe it is to make the page XML / XHTML compliant.

Descriptions / meta tags are less used by engines these days due to abuse, they work more on page content, which is why you need lots of good words on a page for Google to like it.

[Richard M]

What he said ^
Take a look at the nthellworld.co.uk source code, we have an excellent Google ranking and all we have is this, hardly anything in the way of that META crap - I was considering removing it altogether because no decent search engine uses it:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="keywords" content="ntl, ntl:home, broadband, dialup, cable, digital, tv, nthellworld, nthw, user, group, community, forum, forums, discussion, chat, telephony, telephone, phone, billing, customer, service" />
<meta name="description" content="NTHW, the NTL user group with forums for discussion on broadband, cable tv, dialup and lots more." />
<title>nthellworld.co.uk - user community </title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./css/nthw.css" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="./favicon.ico" />
<link rel="P3Pv1" href="./w3c/p3p.xml" />
</head>

Oh and I'll just mention that if you use the following page, you'll see the extra CSS features in Firefox or Mozilla (or any other standards compliant browser) that IE cannot do:
http://www.nthellworld.co.uk/home?nav=contact