HTML – Building a house.
This is not about learning HTML, but learning the basic structure in order to have a better understanding of where and how to add affiliate links and special codes for analytics.
The basics of HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language is much like building a house.
The bare basics of an HTML page – 3 little things.
Foundation <html> and </html>
Roof <head> and </head>
Frame <body> and </body>
Note the / is used to close each code section.
The HTML tag goes at the beginning and the ‘close’ HTML tag goes at the end.
<html>
Note that a web page begins and ends with HTML for a solid foundation.
<head>
Stuff goes here like page title, meta tags, styling and special coding instructions.
</head>
<body>
All content goes here, and generally affiliate also code goes here, but a few exceptions.
</body>
</html>
And end it all with the HTML close tag – /.
Almost everything in HTML requires opening brackets < > and closing brackets < / >. The / marks the end of the instructions.
If you are using a CMS (content management system) program like WordPress or if you are using something like WIX you will not see all this code, but be aware that it is there, along with much more, of course. Companies like Google will give you instructions for adding their affiliate code to your website. There are also many WordPress plugins that will help you add affiliate advertising code and do other things like rotating ads.
Note About Adding Affiliate Code to WordPress:
Adding code to a WordPress blog or page, requires that you change from “Visual” view to “Text” view. Text view is the HTML code view. Also, if you want to place affiliate code in a WordPress sidebar, you need to select the “Text” widget, and paste the code into that “Text” widget.
Summary of how a simple HTML page works:
Architect & Blueprints – The web browser and programing to read HTML.
Foundation – Tells the browser that it is reading an HTML page. <html> and </html>
Roof – Covers important special aspects about the page. <head> and </head>
Frame – Encloses what all will be included as content to the web site. <body> and </body>
Inside the Frame: ie. the “Body” – Walls, Pluming, and Wiring – The shape and way the web site will look and function. The Code.
Content – Words and pictures. Text, Pictures, Forms, etc.
That is the basic structure of a web page.
Why is it important to know basic HTML structure?
Why is HTML important to understand for affiliate marketing? Most affiliate code goes into the “body” area, but some affiliate programs and analytics and statistic gathering programs will instruct that code goes into the “head” area. The “head” area would be between the <head> and </head>.
Fortunately many companies, such as Google, will give you special instructions for adding code to WordPress pages for some of their services, which is easier than going into the code, but it’s good to at least know the basic structure of an HTML web page.
Here is an actual example of a Dreamweaver HTML structured page.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>