Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML is the basic language used for building websites. Hence, an HTML document is also known as a web page and consists of tags which may or may not come in pairs.

It’s important to have a basic concept of what this is mainly because this can help you understand why things look the way they do on your website. With some basic HTML knowledge you can already create a basic web page. HTML can help you achieve a number of different formatting preferences and options such as:

• Tables
• Paragraphs
• Text formatting
• Links
• Lists

These are just examples of what you can do with basic knowledge. You can do a lot more when you acquire advanced skills. For example, advanced HTML can let you specify your desired web page descriptions and information that you want major search engines to know.

It’s not an absolute requirement for you as a blogger to learn the language. Most blogging platforms have built in editors that let you format blog posts and elements. Knowing HTML however can be particularly helpful in cases where an editor is not functioning properly or when you want to manually format something on your sidebar. Also, once you become a blog expert, you may also want to manually control elements without relying on the potential limitations of formatting editors or tools.

Some of the most common examples of tags are:

• <p></p> – for opening and ending a paragraph
• <br> – text following this tag will start in a new line
• <ul></ul> – for specifying unordered lists
• <ol></ol> – for specifying ordered lists
• <li></li> – for starting and ending each list item
• <strong></strong> – for making text bold
• <a></a> + the “href” attribute contained in the opening tag – for creating links

You can watch the video above for a demonstration of these sample tags. The best place to learn all you need to know about HTML is w3schools.com.