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Contents

* Getting started
* DOCTYPE declaration
- META & TITLE tags
* Colour & layout
* Text organization
* Images
* Tables
* Validation

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Before you read any further, add the following tags into your document [in between the <HTML> start and end tags]:
<HEAD> </HEAD>
These identify the head of your document, and all tags mentioned on this page should go in between these two.
Now, pick a title for your page - it should be descriptive [don't just call it `My Page' or `Music']
Here is an example of a good title:
<TITLE>The Beatles - lyrics and guitar tabs</TITLE>
This is not a very good title:
<TITLE>The Beatles</TITLE>
because it does not describe what exactly is contained in your page - which is very useful when your pages are indexed by the search engines.
A very useful META tag is the content-type tag, it tells browsers that access your page what kind of content to expect from it:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
text/html means that this page is an HTML document that contains text; charset specifies the character set used to make your page. Just use ISO-8859-1 - it's the standard Latin character set. For other character sets, refer to the links section.
The next set of META tags tells the search engines about you:
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Your name">

<META NAME="Copyright" CONTENT="© year, your name, your company name">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="What you used to make your document - Notepad, SimpleText, etc.">

The next set of META tags tells the search engines about the `semantic' content of your document [this is what the search engines actually search]:
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Enter up to 1000 characters' worth of keywords separated by commas that describe your page's content - do not repeat yourself too much or the search engines will ignore them">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Enter a description for your site; 200 characters or less">

It is a very good idea to use your keywords in your title and your description - gives you a better chance at a higher ranking with the search engines.

Remember: Make sure that you use quotation marks around all text that comes after the = sign, otherwise pages may not display correctly.
All of the tags you see here must go in between the HEAD start and end tags. And none of them will actually show up on your document, except for the title, which will show up at the top of your browser. Ready to write some code that people can actually see :)?

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