What happens if the meta tags are present in the document body?
I am working on a ASP application and the code, template and files are organized in a way that does not allow me to alter anything outside the body tag. So I am thinking about inserting the meta tags inside the body -- like this:
<!-- FEW ASP INCLUDES -->
<html>
<head>
<!-- FALLBACK TITLE AND DESCRIPTION -->
<title>Default Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Default Description">
</head>
<body>
<!-- SOME HTML MARKUP -->
<div class="dynamic-content">
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="dynamic-content" -->
<!-- THIS IS WHERE I CAN WRITE ASP CODE -->
<title><%= Page.Meta.GetTitle( yada, yada ) %></title>
<meta name="description" content="<%= Page.Meta.GetDescription( yada, yada ) %>">
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
</div>
<!-- SOME MORE HTML MARKUP -->
</body>
</html>
I am wondering how good it is to put meta tags inside the body of an HTML document. How does it affect:
- search engines
- browsers
Answer
This is of course invalid as per HTML4.01. META tags are only allowed within HEAD (just like, say, TITLE) so by putting it into a BODY, you're essentially creating an invalid markup.
From the cursory tests, it seems that some browsers (e.g. Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4) actually put these elements into HEAD when creating a document tree. This is not very surprising: browsers are known to tolerate and try to interpret all kinds of broken markup.
Having invalid markup is rarely a good idea. Non-standard handling by browsers might lead to various hard-to-pin rendering (and behavioral) inconsistencies. Instead of relying on browser guessing, it's best to follow a standard.
I don't know how search engines react to such tag soup, but I wouldn't risk experimenting to find out :) Perhaps they only parse HEAD tag for certain information and will skip your BODY-contained tags altogether. Or maybe they consider these to be some malicious gambling attempts and black-list pages containing such markup. Who knows.
The bottom line — avoid this whenever possible.