HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the markup language for web pages. It defines the structure and content of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, links and images.Open glossary entry → is the fundamental language of the web. Using so-called tags, it describes the structure of a page, for example headings, paragraphs, lists, links and images. An image is embedded with the <img> tag, a link with <a href>.

For search engines and crawlers, HTML is especially important because it forms the directly readable basis of a page. Content already present in the initial HTML is captured more robustly than content created only by JavaScript.

Key SEOSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) covers all measures that help a website become more visible in unpaid (organic) search results.Open glossary entry → elements are provided via HTML:

• the title tagThe title tag is an HTML element in the page that defines the page title. It appears in the browser tab and can be used as the clickable title in search results.Open glossary entry → and the meta descriptionThe meta description is an HTML element in the page that briefly summarises the page's content. Google can display it as the description in the search result.Open glossary entry →,
• headings such as H1The H1 is a web page's main heading. It names the central topic, is visible to users and should generally appear only once per page.Open glossary entry →, H2 and H3,
• real internal linksInternal linking refers to links that connect pages within the same website. They control how search engines and users find and thematically classify content.Open glossary entry → with the href attribute,
• the alt attribute for images.

HTML is often combined with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the language used to define the layout and design of web pages. CSS controls colours, fonts, spacing and arrangement, among other things.Open glossary entry → for layout and JavaScript for interactivityInteraction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly a page responds to user input across all interactions and represents interactivity.Open glossary entry →.