XHTML, CSS, or HTML? Do they effect Rankings?

[johnfloyd]

I have read that websites using XHTML tend to do better in terms of Google rankings. The article said it had to do with sites being "Valid and Compliant." Is this true?

If so, is there any opinion as to software that a novice could use that would develope XHTML site. Or is it better to stick with HTML?

[Jeff Mott]

It is possible this is true, but realize that correlation does not imply causation. A valid site—one with proper tag nesting, required attributes, and following other syntactic rules—will not necessarily have better searchable content than an invalid site. However, developers who seek validity seem more likely to be mindful of separating the content from the design. So, validity and structured, searchable content may be correlated, but one does not cause the other. Both have some other root cause.

That being said, no software meant for novices will create a well structured page. You will, in fact, need to learn and deeply understand HTML.

You should stick with HTML for now. XHTML is not supported well enough to provide any improvements.

[johneva]

Having good clean coding does help with SEO as there is less to be crawled, same as using external style sheets and external scripts help too. So yes using XHTML would help slightly in SEO, but you don’t have to use XHTML to have good coding, you can still use good coding techniques and use HTML which is more forgiving for a newbie.

Though if you are already good with HTML and have a good standard of CSS, XHTML is a good thing to use as it is stricter and forces you to use good coding. Though even then you can still do some stuff the is bad practice but it will still validate.

Biggest thing for SEO at the min though is simply good original relevant content that is updated regularly.

[felgall]

A valid HTML or XHTML web page should do better than one with errors because the search engine will be able to better understand what the page is about.

A page using external CSS should rank higher than one that doesn't because the real content of the page will make up a larger percentage of the (x)HTML file.

Using this also makes the page more user friendly to people using web readers and non-computer devices to access your page.

[johneva]

Now why could I not say it so simple but yet so perfect?