[TYPO3-english] Pt #2: How to position a custom page title tag near the top of my head section?

Wed Jun 29 22:26:45 CEST 2011

While I tend to agree that the SEO value of moving around the title is
questionable (at best), our client has hired a dedicated SEO company who has
insisted on the <title> tags position. So while I would guess the <head> tag
is distilled down to it's components, and the value extracted from the
various components and used in the great Google (Yahoo, etc) algorithms,
I've read a few different articles that say that *some* search engines
(perhaps not Google or any of the bigger search companies) may still give
some weight or importance to the <head> organization.

Either way, our client, and the clients fairly large SEO firm want the
<title> tag on top, and they are willing to pay for it. If it's not possible
without writing a bunch of code or modifying core files, then perhaps
ultimately we'll deem it 100% impractical... But, I'm hoping that somebody
out there has run across this issue before (like Mr. Webster in his original
post) and come up with a solution! Alternatively, if anybody has
any DEFINITIVE proof that the <title> tag placement does not matter at all,
then I'll happily pass the information along! I've found several blog posts
discussing the issue, most which say it PROBABLY doesn't matter, but that's
not quite definitive!

Thanks for the response!

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Christopher Torgalson <
bedlamhotel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Kevin Mitchell
> <kevin at infielddesign.com> wrote:
> > Hello all!
> >
> > I'm sorry to bring up a topic that has been discussed previously but I'm
> > hoping to dig a bit deeper to find a solution:
> > http://lists.typo3.org/pipermail/typo3-english/2010-July/070033.html
> >
> > My basic goal is to move my custom <title> tag to the top of the <head>
> > section of my page. Simple (I hoped!)! The problem I'm running into is
> the
> > same as Harm Webster's in the post above - I am generating a custom title
> in
> > the headerData and not using the native *###TITLE###*. I would move the
> > headerData section up in the page using *
> > typo3/sysext/cms/tslib/templates/tslib_page_frontend.html* however I also
> > have some other content in headerData, such as conditional CSS for IE,
> some
> > custom meta tags, etc (which needs to be near the bottom of the page).
> So,
> > simply moving headerData to the top of the page (which would solve my
> > <title> position problem), and to be honest I'm not sure what other
> issues
> > moving headerData around might cause.
> >
> > Is anybody aware of any solutions to this issue? For instance (just a
> wild
> > example), is it possible to add a new "attribute" to the
> > tslib_page_frontend.html file, such as *###HEADERDATATOP### *and somehow
> map
> > it to an attribute that acts the same as headerData, so I could move
> > ###HEADERDATATOP### to the top of the tslib_page_frontend.html file and
> push
> > my custom title into this attribute, while leaving ###HEADERDATA### at
> the
> > bottom of the page in it's original position?
> >
> > I am not yet an expert with typoscript, so I apologize if there is a
> simple
> > answer to this issue. I've talked with a few typoscript veterans and
> nobody
> > has come up with a solution yet at this point.
> >
> > Also, I would not be apposed to installing an extension if
> > absolutely necessary, though I would of course prefer to do this with an
> > "out of the box" and native solution!
>
>
> Seriously: if somebody's telling you that the *position* of a *unique*
> element in the head of an HTML document has any effect whatsoever on
> SEO, demand verifiable evidence. This is almost certainly magical
> thinking, and not worth wasted development time. It also suggests an
> extremely simplistic view of what search-engines actually do...
>
>
> --
> Christopher Torgalson
> http://www.typo3apprentice.com/
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