META ATTRIBUTES - DOES ORDER MATTER!?!

[NiallSmith]

Good Morning Mozers,

I am currently working with a developer on a new website and they've recently sent me some mock-ups. When I viewed the source, however, the  order of the 'META' attributes was much different than any web page I've seen before.

From what it appears, the developer had placed 'mobile', 'cache expiration' and a number of other attributes much more highly than what I'm used to seeing the portion lead with, i.e. META description, META keywords, etc.

With that, my question for the community is: does the order of the META 'attributes' matter when developing a new website?

If you have (what appear to be) less important attributes placed closer to the beginning tag, does it make (what were previously considered the most 'relevant attributes) less important to the spiders when they come crawl the site?

Finally, what are the best META attributes and best method for constructing the meta portion of the code on a web page?

[kchandler]

As long as you have the correct syntax and it is all in the of the document there is no negative or positive effect on the positioning of the META elements in regards to SEO.

As for the best META elements to include for an SEO benefit - that would be your title and description tags.

Hope this helped! - Kyle

[Klarke]

It doesn't matter for the main tags - title and description.

However this guy feels the position of the Content Type meta tag does matter, so you might want to consider that.

http://news.smartlabsoftware.com/2008/11/17/meta-tag-order-does-matter/

[Vacatia_SEO]

So I just asked this same question here because I couldn't find any answers from Mozzers on this topic. This was from 2 years ago. I've been finding conflicting advice on META order. It seems like best practice would be to have title before keywords. AM I wrong?