Basic HTML For SEO – Part 2, Anatomy of a Web Page
TweetHTML is a markup language made up of tags which govern functions on a web page. As a student of basic HTML concepts, there are a number of tags you should be familiar with. The next articles in this series will concentrate on those tags which can have an effect on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
Dissecting the Page
The first set of tags to cover are those which lay out the basic anatomy of a web page. It is inside these tags which all of the other tags will reside. Here they are, laid out in the order in which they appear on a web page:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Is That It?
It may not look like much, but this is just the basic outline. All the real magic comes from what you add to this basic layout. Here are the functions of those basic tags:
<html></html> – this sets off the page and lets the web browser know the page being viewed is HTML and not some other type of markup.
<head></head> – this sets off the header. Tags included in the header are generally not rendered on the browser, though some may affect how the browser displays the rest of the page.
<body></body> – between these tags is where the content of your web pages will reside. All text, images, dynamic content, etc. will go in here. Because of that, this is the largest part of the web site.
You’ll not that the tags come in pairs. The tag with just the letters in them are called “opening” tags and the ones with the leading slash are called “closing” tags. Although there are exceptions, tags in HTML must come in pairs. In later articles, I’ll point out those exceptions so you can see how they work.
You’ll also notice that some tags go inside other tags. For instance, the <head> and <body> tags go inside the <html> tags. Most tags are meant to fit inside other ones. Almost all tags go into the <body> and are not appropriate for the <head>. There are times when you might want to nest tags in order to get a certain look. Although that’s a little advanced for our purposes right now, it’s a good thing to know.
Next: Header tags …
Please feel free to drop questions in the comments.
