How To Optimize Your Content For All Web Browsers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Browser compatibility is a very important issue for webmasters. With so many browsers on the market today it is imperative that you ensure your content is optimized for the various browsers. Internet Explorer alone has several versions that are popular and your site visitors could be viewing pages from IE5, IE6, IE7, or IE8.

Beyond Internet Explorer, you could have site visitors viewing your web pages with any of the following browsers:

Firefox
Safari
Chrome
Flock
Opera

These are the major browsers. There are hundreds of other smaller browsers out there that you could encounter, but at the very least you should make sure that your web pages are optimized for these browsers. How do you do that?

A black hat search engine optimization method (I do NOT RECOMMEND) that webmasters have used in the past is cloaking. This is the practice is showing one version of a web page to search engine robots while showing another page to the site visitor. You can show different versions of your web page to site visitors using different browsers, but this method is frowned upon by the search engines because it’s deceptive. There have been spammers who have used cloaking to be much more deceptive and misleading for the purpose of manipulating search rankings so the search engines discount this practice altogether. Again don’t use cloaking and be sure to optimize your content and website pages for all web browsers.

The best and surest way to ensure cross-browser compatibility is to rely on W3C standards regarding the version of HTML you use in your pages. The use of HTML 4.01 Strict doctype (document type) will make IE6 and later versions of Internet Explorer view your pages closer to the way Firefox shows them. You’ll want to include code that looks like this near the top of your page:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.yourwebsite.com/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

While this code won’t fix all browser-compatibility issues, it will go a long way to ensure that the major browsers on the market see your web pages the way you want them to be seen.