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**jont** · 28-Mar-2006, 09:56 AM

Delete that line straight away and bin your SEO company - they are blocking every Actinic page on your site!!!!

**June** · 28-Mar-2006, 10:22 AM

Many thanks for confirming my suspicions, John, I have deleted the line now.
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt as to lack of knowledge with Actinic structure, as he does not get involved with Actinic design himself

I'll give it a few days - thought he was cheap!!

Your help greatly appreciated

**jont** · 28-Mar-2006, 10:42 AM

How anyone can miss that everything is in the single /acatalog/ directory when analysing the site is beyond me. Hopefully no damage has been done

**June** · 28-Mar-2006, 10:59 AM

I agree, I can't understand it myself, and I'm a novice....

I have also been advised to include these lines in the index area - any idea how I could incorporate these into the brochure page of Actinic? -

www.mindmachine.co.uk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
meta name="refresh" content="120">

<meta name="robots"content="index,follow">

<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2006. Mind Machine. All Rights Reserved.">

<meta name="author" content="www.mindmachine.co.uk">

<meta name="language" content="English">

<meta name="revisit-after" content="1">

Many thanks again

**jont** · 28-Mar-2006, 11:06 AM

The main brochure template is usually Act_BrochurePrimary.html (check by going to design | options | brochure and click edit next to "overall layout")

All those want to go between the <head> and </head> tags ...you will see the meta tags for keywords and description there also

**June** · 28-Mar-2006, 11:47 AM

Many thanks again for you help on this, John

**pinbrook** · 29-Mar-2006, 11:29 AM

I would have seriousdoubts about paying this person for SEO advise. the above tag which he has said needs ti be included does not need to be included.

It is the default, ie a robot will index and follow whether the tag was there or not, you only need the tag if you want no index or nofollow.

Thus if this rudimentary piece of knowledge is lacking,I wonder what else he doesn't know

**jont** · 29-Mar-2006, 12:06 PM

TBH I am not sure if any of the big search engines will now take any notice of those meta tags (or certainly add any weight into the mix) .... they do seem to be about 5 years behind the game in suggesting to use them.

If you do implement them please let us know how you get on with the SERP's

**June** · 08-Apr-2006, 07:17 AM

Thanks for your responses on this - interesting!

I have been fastidiously inserting meta descriptions and keywords for all my product areas and section areas (this takes a lot of time), but it seems Google especially may (almost) ignore these and concentrate on page titles and the content of the page

Should I just concentrate on the page content and ignore the metas apart from the titles which I gather are important?

I get the feeling the only people gaining from the myth? of the metas are the SEO's, who charge for providing a service which is (possibly) unnessary but lucrative

**Duncan Rounding** · 08-Apr-2006, 07:28 AM

In contrast - I originally forgot to put some meta descriptions on a lot of my pages. In Google these were indexed but against alt text at the top of the page, which meant a lot of indexed pages had theh same indexed text. After later adding relevant meta descriptions I find that Google uses these in preference (took a while for Google to chnage the indexing mind) which is far better.
MSN on the other hand seem to pick either meta descriptions or product descriptions but not the alt text - so adding meta descriptions had little influence.

At the same time I added meta keywords but I haven't seen any chnage in either Google or MSN with these.

**June** · 08-Apr-2006, 08:49 AM

Thanks Duncan, I will keep on with the descriptions anyway. Just wondered what other experiences were on this, as quite often you don't know whether some of these 'experts' are just fleecing the pocket unnecessarily through the owner's lack of knowledge (true in my case, I'm afraid!)

**jont** · 08-Apr-2006, 08:54 AM

Originally posted by June

Should I just concentrate on the page content and ignore the metas apart from the titles which I gather are important?

Page content is vitaly important alongside page titles so would concentrate on those first.... but you may as well and should make use of the description and keyword metas as Duncan rightly points out .... there is life beyond Google and people do use other search engines.

I tend to add the product descriptions in first and that allows an overview of which keywords and phrases you should be adding into the meta tags

**RuralWeb** · 08-Apr-2006, 09:15 AM

SEO has inserted disallow acatalog

I have seen this trick a few times on other websites. The "SEO Expert" inserts the robots disallow with the full knowledge that it will block certain pages, they then know that the page/s will never show on google so they are able to continually sell optomisation advice. You would not pay them anymore if you were No1 would you!!

All the above advice is spot on - with Actinic it is very easy to DIY SEO and there is lots of advice on previous threads. I do not bother with meta tags, you are far better concentrating on researching your keyword/phrases and putting them in the body text and title tag. Also make sure that your product title is keyword rich as this is used in the image alt tag which does have an effect on the SEs.

After all that to polish off you can go back and add meta tags for all the SEs that still use them if any.

**pinbrook** · 08-Apr-2006, 09:27 AM

I tend to use meta keywords and meta description.

Keywords - I use this to tell me what keywords that page is specifically optimised for, I then use the same words in Google adsense keywords (non shop pages only). My average keyword list is 4 words

Description - just to ensure there is a description for engines that do'nt create their own (as in Duncan's post)

Both of these practises are icing on the cake rather than downright necessary, it only takes a couple of minutes to add this info and you can only win from using them.

Announcement

Robots.txt file disallow acatalog??

Robots.txt file disallow acatalog??

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