Understanding HTML for SEO

HTML is the language used by webpages and is what Google looks at to understand your page*. If you right-click on this page and select “view source”, you will see the raw HTML code your browser downloaded to create this page.

Although each web platform has its own ways of setting things like title tags, h1 tags, meta tags, etc., it varies from platform to platform, as does the words and language used to describe them.

Web inspection tools also show you these things, but are not always accurate. The only way to (a) really understand what we mean by things like “title tag”, “meta tag” and so on, and (b) the only way to really know it has been done properly, is to be able to inspect the HTML of your webpage yourself.

I’ve already written a guide for this in the blog, which I’ll copy over to the knowledge base in time, but for now you can read here.

* A couple of caveats here. First to be pedantic HTML is not a language, it is markup – so more akin to Rich Text Format than a real language like C++ or javascript. Second, Google now uses AI to “read” your page in the same way a human does, which prevents simply spamming the most important tags. The tags are still important though, and using them correctly very much still works.