Introduction

Section Objective: Create a shell HTML document file, check for well formed HTML tags using a HTML validator and use web developer inspection tools.

Download the 26-shell-html-document.zip file to your course project folder and extract all the files.

All instructions for this section assume that you are using files from the practice folder found in the 26-shell-html-document folder.

There are a few HTML element tags that need to be in every HTML document for two reasons. One is so that the HTML can be validated. HTML validator software may not allow validation if required elements are missing.

The other reason is that you want to assure you have the minimum information for SEO. This includes the HTML document title and description.

What is SEO?

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO includes the practices and techniques to use content and internet marketing to attract quality visitors to a web page or web site by using keywords to query a search engine service like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

SEO is a subject deserving its own course of study. This course introduces you to the important role HTML plays in SEO.

This is the starter set of HTML elements that you will need in every HTML document:

  1. The doctype declaration. This is not an HTML element. It is an instruction about what version of HTML is being used. We will use the doctype declaration for the version called HTML5. HTML validation software usually requires this element.

  2. The html with the lang attribute to identify the main supported human language internationalization. This is container element for the head and body elements.

  3. The head container element tags. Contains elements having information about the HTML document. For example the document language, title and description.

  4. The body container element tags. Contains the elements that will display visible content. We start on them in the next course section.

  5. The meta element tag with the charset attribute to identify the character set.

  6. The title element for document title used for SEO.

  7. The meta element tag with the name and content attributes for the document description used in SEO

Since this is a starter set of HTML elements. You can expect that there are additional HTML elements that might be included for what you or anyone might consider a starting shell HTML document.

Complete and Continue