5 Commonly Used HTML Element Tags and What They Do

Web Design and Development- Here to Help

Taking your first foray into web  design and development  can be a daunting task. What do all these buzzwords mean – and what is a meta description anyway? In our latest post we explore 5 commonly used HTML element tags and what they do.

<Meta>

Meta tags are tags used to store data such as metadata, meta-titles, meta-keywords, etc. They’re important because they allow search engine bots to crawl your site and pick up useful information. This is part of how Google and other search engines rank the importance of your site.

An example of metadata would be:

<meta charset=”UTF-8”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Blogging about meta tags”>
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”HTML, meta tags, awesome blogs”>
<meta name=”Author” content=”Jonathan Ben-Avraham”>
These tags would be placed within the <head></head> tags in your HTML document.

<nav>

Nav or Navigation tags define parts of the web page which is specified for navigation throughout the site or page. E.g you might have some code looking like this:

<nav>
<li><a href=”www.mywebsite.co.uk/accommodation”>Accommodation</a></li>
<li><a href=”www.mywebsite.co.uk/things-to-do”>Things To Do</a></li>
</nav>

<strong>

The strong element makes the text within a <h1/> or <p/> tag bold. A lot of developers use this element to make their headers larger or to express the importance of certain content which may be hardcoded in that can’t be edited from the CMS platform ( for instance, WordPress, Joomla etc.)

<p>This is regular text. <strong>This is strong text.</strong></p>

<script>

The script tags are much less used these days due to scripting files like .js or .css files but are still in use and can still be useful when scripting for specific parts of the HTML document. We will show you two examples of script tags, one for a JavaScript and one for a CSS script. JavaScript is a web scripting language which adds elements to websites to make them more interactive.

Javascript <script> tag:

<script>
document.getElementById(“example”).innerHTML = “Hello, you’re using JavaScript!”
</script>

This JavaScript script tag changes the text displayed by an element with the identification “example” to “Hello, you’re using JavaScript!”

CSS <script> tag:

<script>
background-color:#FFF00;
</script>

This CSS script would make the background colour of your HTML document bright Yellow.

<iframe>

The iframe element is used to embed media into a webpage, for example you could embed a SoundCloud file, an image, a movie, a video, etc. Embedding is a great way to share other people’s online content too. For example if you find a video on YouTube that you want to share, you can find the embed code which almost always starts with <iframe> and ends with </iframe>.

Here is an example of how <iframe> tags are used

<iframe width=”420” height=”315” src=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ByLmLnYJ8></iframe>

Using the 5 Commonly Used HTML Element Tags

Of course, this merely skims the surface of great web development, however, eBay wasn’t built in a day! If your needs extend further, the POSH door is always open for support for any web design and development queries. In the meantime, take our 5 commonly used HTML element tags are begin building the blueprint to your e-commerce empire!