HTML Page Structure
Before you start to write the content for your page you must first get the page ready.
Declare your DTD (Document Type Definition)
You will need to declare a DocType. Declare a what? you ask. For a brief explanation and a list of the most common document types - DocTypes List
The most important thing is that the use of a DocType Definition (DTD) will make a lot of guessing by the browser unnecessary, and will thus trigger a "standard" parsing mode, where the understanding (and, as a result, the display) of the document is not only faster, but will be consistent and free of any bad surprise that documents without a DocType will create. For an example of this, open up the following two pages in your FireFox browser.
With the DocType Definition ↔ Without the DocType Definition.
For now we will be working with basic html, the DocType we are going to use
is "HTML 4.01 strict". This needs to be stated and placed at the the very
top of the page. The declaration must be exact (both in spelling and in case).
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Define the HTML Sections
The HTML code is divided into two Sections, the "head" and the "body". Both sections are kept inside <html> tags. Your page must start with <html> and end with </html>.
Head Section
The first section inside the html tags is the head tag, it opens with <head> and closes with </head>
This section is not displayed on the page and is used for meta tags and information to help the Search engines find your page.
The page must have only one open head tag and one closing head tag.
Body Section
The second section must open with <body> and close with </body> tag. Inside the body tag is where you will place all of the information for your page. This includes the layout design information and viewer displayed content.
Like the head section the page must have only one open body tag and one close body tag.