What is HTML?

You may have heard of HTML, or it may mean absolutely nothing to you - either way it doesn’t matter; all you need to know is that it is what makes the web work.

Just as we use language to communicate in our daily lives, web sites use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to translate our website’s content into something that can be understood by the web browser that we use.

It is used by web designers to take the layout of the pages and turn it into a language that can be displayed by a web browser and seen by the world.

At it’s simplest, it is used to tell the browser what is a heading, and what is a paragraph, as in the example shown below:

<h1>Welcome to our website!</h1>
<p>Our products are well-made and very good value, so buy them now!</p>

This way, it is used by search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to index the page properly - making sure that the headings are shown in the search results, and a description of the page content.