Hi, All I have some questions regarding doctype First of all, What is DOCTYPE??? Secondly, What is the purpose of DOCTYPE?? Thirdly, Does this affect SERP?? Lastly, How to use them properly?? Thanks everyone,,in advance..
Check this out http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Doctype as for SERPS, I don't know. It would seem to make sense to me that a decent search engine will pay attention to the validity of the html, but I have no evidence for this. I would also be interested in knowing if anyone has any knowledge of the relevence of Doctype to SERPS.
I don't use it and I have some excellent rankings. I believe that 'content is king' when it comes to the serps.
The Doctype itself isn't likely to help your rankings, but you should add the Doctype declaration before running a page through the W3C validator. I've seen numerous Web pages that had coding errors so egregious that the spiders could not parse out the content properly. You can find the validator at http://validator.w3.org Also, one of the issues that the MSN beta search raises is the need for clean code. The best way to assure that is with the validator. Quote: "Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages." You can find this at: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm&FORM=WGDD I usually code in XHTML, and as a general rule every page is run through the W3C validator. This not only assures readability of the code, but also improves performance by eliminating errors that cause the re-rendering of a page in the browser.
W3C validation is also an important aspect of accessability. The fact that it improves cross browser compatibility means that it is likely to be better understood by someone using a speech browser, for example. It is not sufficient in and of itself though.