HTML

What the abbreviation means

• HyperText — text with links to other pages. Links are what turn separate pages into a web.
• Markup — content is wrapped in tags that say what it is: a heading, a paragraph, an image.
• Language — a set of rules every browser reads the same way.

The language was created by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s. Today’s version is called HTML5 and adds video, audio and elements that describe the role of each part of the page.

The main tags

• <h1> to <h6> — headings by level; a page has one main <h1> heading;
• <p> — a paragraph;
• <a> — a link;
• <img> — an image, with a text description in the alt attribute;
• <ul>, <ol>, <li> — lists;
• <form>, <input>, <button> — a form;
• <header>, <nav>, <main>, <footer> — the parts of the page.

Example

Two sites look the same. In the first, the service name is marked up as the <h1> heading, the menu as navigation, and the images have descriptions. In the second, everything is plain blocks styled to look like headings. A sighted visitor sees no difference. Google, a blind person’s screen reader and an AI assistant see a clear structure in the first site and text without hierarchy in the second.

Why it matters for a business

Search engines and AI assistants read the structure of a page before they get to the design. Clear headings, described images and links with meaningful text help Google understand what the page is about. The same holds for accessibility, which since 2025 has been mandatory for many online shops in the EU. That is why clean HTML is a search and accessibility decision, not only a technical detail.

What to ask

• Does every page have one main heading and subheadings in order?
• Do the images have text descriptions?
• Can the site be used with a keyboard alone?
• Does the content management system produce clean HTML, or does it add needless layers of code?

Clean, semantic HTML is the base of a page’s accessibility and search performance, so our website development starts there.