asci characters in Meta Description and Keywords

[Fara]

Hi,
I have entered some text for my section's meta description and keywords. My keywords may contain characters like periods (.) or a dash (-). These characters are getting translated into asci characters when uploaded.

A) Will this cause a problem when it comes to searching?
B) Is there anyway to avoid this and show the actual chracters in the file?

Thanks for any help.

Fara

[Bruce]

Hi,

This answer might be a bit technical but i will proceed anyways. According to the HTML 4 specification, the data of a META tag is of type cdata.

The same document describes cdata as...

--------------------"---------------------
CDATA. For attribute values, this refers to a sequence of characters from the document character set, which may include character entities. User agents should resolve CDATA before further processing of attribute values. The HTML 4.0 specification often places further constraints on the permitted syntax for CDATA attributes.
--------------------"---------------------

This means that characters may be encoded, what this doesn't say is that
the special characters need to be encoded. Have not been able to find anything that says that special characters should or should not be encoded. In Actinic it is done because all HTML output is parsed by a common routine which encodes unsafe characters.

So long as the search engine is complaint with HTML 4 then it should decode the description before processing it.

[Fara]

Bruce,
Thanks for your reply. I also called Actinic support line for this issue and got the exact same response. You are right in that the answer is a quite technical, but I understand what's going on. I don't feel comfortable leaving the text as is and hope that the search engines are HTML compliant. Therefore, I have to change some of the text.

I have looked at other sites developed using Actinic and I don't see the same problem in their site. For example, the source code shows the actual hyphen and period and so on. How have they done this?

I am thinking of hard-coding some of these values into the actual HTML files as opposed to using Actinic front end. Is that going to cause any problems?

One other query that I have is that I would like my "Meta Name=Description" tag to appear right after my Title tag in the source code. At the moment, it appears after a whole bunch of other meta tags. Is there a way for my to do that?

Thanks again for your help.
Fara

[RuralWeb]

I do not bother with meta tags within actinic generally as search engines ignore them these days. If you do enter them then do not use any punctuation ie full stops, hyphens etc these are known as "stop terms" and as you are finding out they can do nasty things to the search engines. When entering your keywords separate each one with a commer and no space. Having said all this the tag to concentrate on is the title tag as this is VERY important, again do not use any "stop terms" and try to only use keywords that appear in your text, also keep it below 40 characters in length.

[Fara]

Malcolm,
Thanks for your reply. This helps me understand how to position my tags. I have now concentrated on my Title tags.

However, I am still a little frostrated as I do not have the flexibility with how I enter my Titles. When I use the placeholder for a Title for my section in Actinic, I can not even enter commas as they get translated into asci characters.

When I attempted to hard-code the title into the generated HTML file and uploaded the site, my text got overwritten by Actinic with the default text. Is there anyway to overcome this? How does everyone else enter titles, etc?

Thanks for any suggestions in advance.

[RuralWeb]

Dont use punctuation

[wjcampbe]

Create a customvar and change your Primary templates to reference this Customvar instead of the NETQUOTEVAR, you just have to remember to add the Customvar to the properties tab of each page you create. I sometimes forget and get two (or more) pages returning the same title (oops).

[Fara]

Success!!

William John Campbell, you are a life saver.

I created and inserted the CUSTOMVARS, and the source is perfect now; just as I need it. Thanks so much for your help.