12 replies to this topic

[trishH]

Being non technical I use a wysiwyg website builder for my sites. I have just tried the new SEO analyser in Bing (great tool!) and whilst it didn't bring up many errors, one of which it's coming up with on the pages I've checked is that 'Meta language information' is missing.

Is it possible to give me a list of what I need to include here? I've tried googling the answer, but it's not clear. Any help would be gratefully received.

[Jill]

Maybe you should Bing it?

[torka]

Jill: Ha!

Trish, my guess is they're talking about specifying the content language:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

(specifies English)

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="de, fr, it">

(German, French and Italian)

If you're not targeting multi-lingual or international audiences, it might not be absolutely necessary to declare a content language, but it's a good practice to do so. If your pages are in HTML5, you should instead use one of the methods outlined here to declare your content language: http://www.w3.org/In...a-http-and-lang

Hope this helps!

--Torka

[trishH]

I didn't think of that, Jill!

Thanks Torka. That sounds sensible, but I would have thought that would have been a problem with all my pages as I'm using a website builder.

I'll check the code.

[chrishirst]

I didn't think of that, Jill!

Odd isn't it, how people will happily use "SEO tools", most of which are completely useless because they only tell you what the developers think you need to know, yet fail to use the very best "SEO tool" you have at your disposal.

Which is yourself and a search engine of your choice, then you search like a USER not like a "SEO" hunting for their OWN pages using "most important keywords"

You will learn a LOT more about SEARCH that way than using "SEO tools".

You don't need to understand search engines, you need to understand search engine USERS of which, you are one.

Edited by chrishirst, 21 June 2012 - 05:14 AM.

[trishH]

The problem is it's very difficult to search 'as a user'. Even when logging out of everything, unless you can use a computer and IP address you've not used before those blasted personalised results get in the way. The number of times Google has tried to guess at what I want to know, rather than just letting me search through the results and make my own mind up is really annoying!

Off topic, but that's a pet annoyance of mine with adsense too. I looked at sofas a couple of months ago, and decided I didn't want to buy a new one. I signed up to a program that I wanted to use. Now all the adsense ads on any site I look at are for sofas and email marketing - neither of which I'm interested in anymore!

No wonder my adsense revenue is plummeting if google are showing useless ads to everyone! (sorry, rant over!)

[chrishirst]

Real users get "personalised" results as well, the only difference is real users don't search incessantly for the SAME few "keywords".

It is just another example of how "checking rankings" does you no good at all.

[trishH]

That's my point! If the personalised results are as useless to my users as they are to me, no wonder they are not clicking on the adsense ads!

[Mikl]

Trish,

I agree with you completely about personalised search results and ads.

But as far as AdSense is concerned, it is fixable. Go to Allow & Block Ads / Blocking Option / Advanced Settings (in your AdSense control panel). You'll see an option for "Interest-based Ads Preference", which you can enable or disable.

Note that, by disallowing your visitors from seeing personalised ads, you are betting that they "are as useless to my users as they are to me". If, as Google claims, such ads produce a better return, your earning will go down.

[chrishirst]

That's my point! If the personalised results are as useless to my users as they are to me, no wonder they are not clicking on the adsense ads!

But the personalised results are NOT useless to REAL users.

Real users are NOT expecting to find their "site" or any other PARTICULAR URL in the results.

Real users do NOT run the same searches several times a day.

Real user DO NOT CARE what URLs come up in the list, just as long as it looks relevant to their query.

Search engine USERS are in control of what they see in the results and you are NOT. By searching for the same thing over and over and over again. YOU are reinforcing YOUR personalised results and Google will ALWAYS try to show you URLs that are new. Or it may be that they will show you different URLs from time to tme just to see if you click on them, thus allowing the SE algorithm engineers to find out if any changes they made are for the betterment of results for REAL users.,

They will also show URLs that you have a history of clicking on (probably the "competition" in your case) and so on and so forth. Get out of this idea that "rank checking" is USEFUL it hasn't been useful since 2003.


The rule of evolution is to adapt or die, you lot seem to be choosing death rather than understanding that things change and you have to change with it or become fossilised!

[Jill]

It's not necessarily personalized results, but "retargeting" (which I suppose IS a form of personalization).

[qwerty]

If I can go back to the original question and unnecessarily complicate matters, Torka is most likely right, but there's another place where the language of a page is (sort of) supposed to go: there is a "lang" attribute of the <html> tag. It looks like this:

<html lang="en">

I don't have a link to this, but Google has stated that they don't pay any attention to it, simply because there are so many content management systems that automatically put the code for English in there, no matter what language the page is actually in. However, I'm told that it does serve a purpose: first, it helps the browser to know things like what kind of quotation marks to use on the page. Secondly, it instructs screen reader software on how to pronounce words. So if a page that contains content in French has English in the html lang attribute, the text "un, deux, trois, quatre" might be read out as "un, de-ux, troys, kwatree".

I've never tested this, but it's definitely something I'd want to avoid.

[torka]

Yep, Qwerty. That's the way you're supposed to do it for HTML5 pages. The link I posted goes into excruciating a lot more detail. Honestly, I don't do it either way for most of my pages (hangs head in shame).

--Torka