As well as the Document Type Definition (essential), the Title Element (essential), the META Description Tag (desirable) and the META Keyword Tag (optional) there are two other tags which help validate the page. They will not affect the ranking of the page but they will help browsers and other user agents in certain circumstances.
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The very first line of every page on your site should be the DOCTYPE! Declaration which tells browsers and other user agents what kind of HTML it will find on the page.
There are lots of different kinds of HTML (e.g. HTML 4.01 Strict, HTML 4.01 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict etc.) and if there is no Document Type Definition (DTD) then browsers will switch out of ‘Standards Compliant’ mode into ‘Quirks Mode’ with unpredictable results.
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