HTML Best Practices You Should Follow

These HTML best practices are designed for web developers who are trying to make the most out of web development platform. Following information would be very helpful for newbies in development field.

Declare Doctype

This is the first and foremost thing you should see in an HTML document. Doctype is a declaration which defines the browser about the standards (XHTML) you will be using and thus it helps the browser to render your Markup perfectly. This would be difficult for some browsers like Internet explorer if the doctype is declared in HTML5 standard.

Use of Title Tags

Title tag <title> is something that gives identity to the website and make search engine friendly.  It is what we see in the Google search result as the main title when we search a specific keyword.  This will be also displayed in Web browser bar and tabs, displaying on the mouse hover.

Perfect Usage of Header Tags

This is another essential best practice. Use the tags h1 to h6 perfectly. This will definitely benefit you for both semantic and the SEO reasons. You could define these headline tags with defining the sub sections and even spliting to inner section, forming h1 to h6.

Use of Meta Tags

This is another important factor considering the search engine spiders. These data are essential to make your site visible in search results. Do not forget to give the meta tags along with the name and other properties of medias in the website.

Meta Description

The meta description of a website gives the brief summary of what your web page contains. Meta description must be given according to the web page. That means a concise and relevant summary.

Proper Usage of Divs

construct your web components well and divide your website into major sections while designing. When you arrange everything properly this avoids confusion if your project is of high complexity. So proper usage of divs is an important process in web development.

Minimum CSS

A normal website has a main CSS file and some other things like CSS reset. The peculiarity of CSS is that each CSS file has to make an HTTP request, which slows down website loading time. So, the best thing you can do is to minimize the CSS by omitting spaces, unwanted characters, lines and tabs. Also, unify the files and combine to a single file. This will effectively increase your website loading time. All these procedures can be termed as the CSS optimization.

Use Lower Case Markup

Use the standard procedure with lower case markup. Even if the capitalized markups will work and does not affect the webpages, this will really mess the code readability. So always use lower case markup.

Alt Tags

Alt tags can be a good friend of your website when it’s mentioned properly. These alt texts help search engines to show up your images for the related search keywords. So never under estimate the power of alt tags.

Be Good with Internet Explorer

It is sure that some point of your development stage, you might have screamed against IE. Create a stylesheet specially for Internet Explorer and name it as “ie.css”. Use this code,

<!--[if lt IE 7]>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="path/to/ie.css" />

<![endif]-->

This code imports the style sheet if the user’s browser is lower than IE7.