HTML Best Practices You Should Follow

Most of the web pages you encounter is presented to you via HTML, the world wide web’s markup language.

Following are best practices that will lead to clean and correct markup:

1. Always Declare a Doctype

The doctype declaration should be the first thing in your HTML documents. The doctype declaration tells the browser about the XHTML standards you will be using and helps it read and render your markup correctly.

2. Use Meaningful Title Tags

The <title> tag helps make a web page more meaningful and search-engine friendly. For example, the text inside the <title> tag appears in Google’s search engine results page, as well as in the user’s web browser bar and tabs.

3. Use Descriptive Meta Tags

Meta tags make your web page more meaningful for user agents like search engine spiders. The description meta attribute describes the basic purpose of your web page (a summary of what the web page contains). For each web page, you should place a consise and relevant summary inside the meta description tag.

4. Use Divs to Divide Your Layout into Major Sections

Consider dividing your web page into major sections as the first step in constructing a website design. Doing so from the start promotes clean and well-indented code. It will also help you avoid confusion and excess use of divs, especially if you are writing complex and lengthy markup.

5. Close Your Tags

Closing all your tags is a W3C specification. Some browsers may still render your pages correctly (under Quirks mode), but not closing your tags is invalid under standards.

7. Use Lower Case Markup

It is an industry-standard practice to keep your markup lower-cased. Capitalizing your markup will work and will probably not affect how your web pages are rendered, but it does affect code readability.

8. Use Alt Attributes with Images

Using a meaningful alt attribute with <img> elements is a must for writing valid and semantic code.

9. Write Consistently Formatted Code

A cleanly written and well-indented code base shows your professionalism, as well as your consideration for the other people that might need to work on your code.
Write properly indented clean markup from the start; it will increase your work’s readability.