Unknown characters appeared in Keywords & Description META Tags

[TheInkDepot]

Hi All

I've just put a set of generic Keywords and Description into Actinic and had it copy them into the sections. I used note pad to copy and paste, when I view source on the live site these chracters '&#46' have appeared in random places!

Any ideas?

Many thanx

Boz

[Mike Hughes]

&#46 is the html code for .

Mike

[TheInkDepot]

Hi Mike

Is it ok to leave that code there?...it must of been generated by Actinic.

Boz

[Mike Hughes]

It's probably fine. I'm not sure you'd need a period in your meta tags, but if you want one then Actinic is just converting it to it's html code.

I doubt that it will cause any problems. If you're in any doubt then check your text for a period and remove it if it's not necessary.

Mike

[TheInkDepot]

Thanx Mike

Have you used this site before Mike www.webmaster-toolkit.com

There's a tool on there called 'Link Popularity Checker' but I'm not sure what the results mean..ie whether they're good, bad etc. It says you should check your url with and without the 'http://' and also without 'http://www.' I get higher numbers from the search with 'http://' got any ideas? the results are below.

ENGINE NUMBER OF LINKS
Google 44
Altavista 681
MSN 0
All the Web 674
Yahoo 692

Many thanx

Boz

[Mike Hughes]

At the end of the day it doesn't mean anything other than you have a good number of links to your site.

The MSN=0 results would worry me except I just looked at MSN and they're telling me that they have 348 links to your site so everything seems fine.

Google's results are always low as they'll only show links that they consider 'significant'. That's usually pages with a high PR but can be other things too.

Mike

[TheInkDepot]

Thanx Mike

Doesnt the number of links help with the search engine placing Mike? How did you find the info regarding the number of links we have on MSN?

Boz

[Mike Hughes]

Go to MSN and search for "Link:www.theinkdepot.co.uk"

Mike

PS. Yes, the principle is more links = better position but the information on the number of links doesn't really have any significance. The only thing that matters in terms of links is that if you want to do better you've got to get more links.

[TheInkDepot]

Thanx Mike...you've been a great help, as per normal