Basic HTML For SEO – Part 1, Introduction
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Is it possible to do good search engine optimization while knowing nothing about the HTML web pages are made of? It’s certainly possible to understand concepts of metatags and text styles and be able to tell those building the pages how you want things set up.
How much easier would it be, though, to work with your IT partners if you got yourself a little “geek cred?” The next few articles are dedicated to helping you understand HTML just enough to let you get into the details of your SEO work.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s as a means of sharing research data among scientists. It is the basis on which all web pages are formed.
By itself, HTML only allows for text, images and links. Other scripting languages and plug-ins can be added to the HTML to add functionality such as Java, JavaScript or Flash. Those add-ons can affect the SEO of a web page, too, but that’s a topic for a later article.
HTML in itself is so simple, one can still code a fairly nice web page using nothing but notepad (or other simple text editor). I remember coding my first web pages for an auto dealer in notepad. Later, I was so jazzed when the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors came out because they certainly made my work easier. Still, even today coding advanced pages in C# using Microsoft’s .NET Framework I find knowledge of good ol’ HTML very handy.
Next … the basic anatomy of a web page. Behind the scenes.
Please feel free to leave comments and questions.
photo credit: Matrixizationized
