Issues

Meta Description: Outside <head>

Pages with a meta description that is outside of the <head> element in the HTML. The meta description should be within the <head> element, or search engines may ignore it.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Meta Description’ tab and ‘Outside <head>’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Check to see if there are any ‘Invalid HTML Elements in Head’ under the ‘Validation’ tab, that could be the cause.

If this issue has also been triggered, use our ‘How To Debug Invalid HTML Elements In The Head‘ tutorial to debug.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when a page has a meta description outside of the <head> element in the HTML.

How To Fix

Ensure meta descriptions are in the <head> element of a page’s HTML so that search engines can choose to use them for their search engine result page snippets.