Before there is text or image there is document type, declaration, meta data and all things above the body open tag. Here we will begin to consider these and their consequences.
We start by specifying the legal structure, elements and attributes of a type of HTML or XHTML that we will build our page with. The Doctype declaration. The declaration must be exact in spelling and in case. This definition is called a "Document Type Definition", DTD or most commonly the Doctype.
A valid doctype declaration will define for the viewer's browser, a "standard" parsing mode, resulting in faster parsing and display of the document. Faster display and parsing for humans means more spider friendly as well. Pages optimization starts with this line.
For our example we will use the latest form, XHTML strict which should look like this
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-s..."The "real world" example page assembled for this series of articles can be found here Antonio's Handyman and General Contracting.
With this page we can track the success or failure of our optimization theories as we build. You will note it is XHTML 1.0 Strict and may be validated by following the W3C link in the right sidebar. The choice of this document type is also important. The use of XHTML and CSS separates code from content as you can see by examining our example document. This improves the readability of your code for search engine spiders and maintains a good content-to-code ratio.
Another consideration is the rapid depreciation of many html tags, resulting in non compliant code for spiders and browsers alike. XHTML and CSS double plus good.
Meta data, meta tags, are the next consideration. These like the DTD are found in the head section of our document the most important of which is your title tag. Often overlooked this tag is a prime consideration of human and robot users alike. Titles should contain your top two or three keywords or phrases and your page description as far as possible. Don't bury your headline, you never get a second chance to make a first impression and put you best foot forward.
You should consider your title tag as your face to the world, it should be as attractive as possible to readers. It is also of critical importance as to how your page will be judged and ranked in search results. Only the total content of your page will weigh more in import. Make it relevant to the sum of that content. Remember the title tag is the only meta data visible to human and robot viewers alike, make it count.
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