As mentioned in our Skills of a Blogger post. One of the essential skills of any blogger is basic HTML knowledge. HTML has been around a long time and is easy to learn and use. You do not need an exhaustive amount of knowledge in this area just enough to get you through the standard rituals that all bloggers go through on a daily basis.

What does HTML mean?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup language.

Keys to Understanding

For the most part HTML tags have a beginning and an end:

:This is the Beginning
This is the end:

However, some tags are singular:

This tag is singular: 

Singular tags should end looking like this: />. Unfortunately the code display script I’m using doesn’t display this correctly.

The best way to learn is to just copy the tags from here and input them in a test blog post. Play around with them and work on memorizing them for later use. You can only rely on the WYSIWYG editors so much until you run into problems.

Header Tags

Header tags are useful for highlighting topic ideas and titles on your posts and blog. These tags are also viewed highly by search engines and should be used correctly.

Heading 1
Heading 1
Heading 1
Heading 1
Heading 1

Paragraph Tag

Paragraph tags help you wrap all text that isn’t a header. This gives you nice gaps inbetween each paragraph, and also gives you the ability to change the alignment easily.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam sapien dui, volutpat vitae, vulputate nec, vehicula facilisis, leo. Integer commodo nisl nec lacus.

Left

Center

Right

Link Tag

Ever clicked a link? Of course you have! This is how it was accomplished.

What You Want to Display

If you want to open a new window when the link is clicked add target=”_blank” after the URL.

Image Tag

You and the image tag will be spending a lot of time together.

You can add width and height to the image by using this syntax: width=”variable” height=”variable”.

Formatting Tags

If you have ideas and messages in your text that you want to stand out from the rest these will be your friends.

Bold
Italics