are Doctype Declaration and meta tags still used? i thought i read some where that they were no longer used, and that search enginges no longer look for meta tags. is this correct?

Doctype declarations are being used! Personally, I prefer to view webpages with Doctype declarations because it shows that they somewhat care about web standards, althoug WYSIWYG editors insert them now, but may not generate valid pages.

Search engines do not look for META tags anymore, but they have other uses for specifying metadata.

ok so we no longer have to use meta tags, or is it best to still use them. and when did search engines stop looking for them?

Doc Type Declarations are very much used.

The Doc Type Declaration (DTD) is a message to the Browser as to which rules to use to parse the Html contained in the page. Without a Doc Type Declaration (DTD) in place, the Browser uses its own set of rules which is referred to as Quirks Mode. Each Browser has a very different set of Quirks Mode rules, so you will be better off using a DTD that has the browser using Standards Compliant Mode.

http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/docty...itch/table.html

Incidently, the xml declaration is not required and, in fact, it is recommended that you mot use one since it places the Browser into Quirks Mode.

Meta Tags are not used as much as they were before, but the SEO types Members would be a better source of information for that. I still put them on most of my pages by habit since it reminds me what the page is about, even if the Bots don't use them.

As has been explained, a Doc Type Declaration is vital for your site to appear correctly in browsers.

Pretty much all search engines now ignore keyword and description meta tags. People started to fill them up with useless keywords, they wouldn't get updated and they were generally unreliable. Letting the owner of a site decide which search terms would bring their page up (regardless of relevance) was a bad idea once Internet advertising was introduced.

Now, most search engines work by looking at the content and context of your page (for example, the word Java could be coffee, programming or geography related) along with which sites link to yours, and with what link text.

Search engines never stopped looking for meta tags completely. However, between 1998 and 2002, search engines dropped support for the keyword meta tag, relying only on content and links from then on. They do, however, have to take notice of some meta tags. The robots attribute especially needs attention from search engines, along with http-equiv headers, often used for redirects.

They're both used.
But google doesn't seem to care much about Meta tag, it concerns your page contents more.