Basic HTML Coding for New Bloggers

Basic HTML Coding for New Bloggers
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What are HTML Tags?

HTML tags are the encoded sections of a blog’s content. The HTML tags are read and interpreted by the reader’s web browser, and it is these tags that tell the browser how to format content, lay out a web page and where to insert images. HTML tags encapsulate text and images. There is always an opening tag such as the “” opening tag and a closing tag that contains a forward slash. For an HTML tag, the closing tag is “”. In the Blogger editor, you use these tags to format your content. You create links, bold text or create an outgoing link using HTML tags. More advanced formatting uses HTML tags, but blogging uses only the basic HTML coding that even a new blogger can learn to implement.

Text Formatting for Emphasis and Quoting

Google Blogger provides several ways to format your blog text. The first type of commonly formatted text is the “bold” tag. You bold your text using the following code:

My Text

Everything within the start and end HTML tag has the characteristic defined by the tag’s code. In this instance, the “strong” tag tells the web browser to bold the text. Additionally, the “” tag italicizes the enveloped text.

The “

” text defines a quoted statement. This is used in Blogger blogs to quote other sources or interviews. The tag offsets the quoted text from your paragraph. You typically use quotation marks and link to the quoted text when blogging. This is a type of online etiquette amongst bloggers when using their content pages for your own blog content.

Creating a Blog Link with Anchor Text

Anchor text is the sentence or keyword phrase seen in a hypertext link. For instance, the following uses “click here” as the anchor text for a link:

Click Here

The “” tag is called an “anchor,” and it provides a link to another blog page. It can also point to another Blogger blog or a separate domain. These links are beneficial for linking out to your blog’s references. The proper anchor text is crucial for Google ranking. The anchor text is used to indicate the relevant content of the outgoing link. For instance, if you use “My Widgets” as the anchor text, Google knows to associate the website URL with “My Widgets.” This means when users insert “my widgets” into the search engine, Google returns the associated URL as a relevant search engine result page.

Creating relevant content with appropriate tags and links provides a friendly user experience, which leads to user bookmarking and higher traffic. For monetized blogs, this can lead to better ad clicks and revenue. The Blogger interface allows you to edit each tag and place them accordingly, so you can decide how your content is presented to the user.