It’s true that using WordPress is the best way to build your company and personal website or blog. It’s incredibly easy to add text, image, and video content using the Visual editor, but what happens when you need to add some specific formatting or functionality and you don’t know any HTML code?
In this article you’ll learn some basic HTML code and tricks for Search Engine Optimization that can be used in any WordPress powered website.
Visual and HTML Editors
The editor is what you use when writing your blog entries. It has two writing modes, Visual and HTML.
The Visual mode is the default setting and it allows you to use handy tools for adding images, links, and other media as well as formatting your text. In other words, it helps you write the HTML without having to know any HTML.
The HTML editor mode allows you to view and write HTML code directly into your blog entry. You can switch back and forth between the Visual and HTML editor modes.
Learning basic HTML is imperative if you want your content to be found by search engines more easily and to help your readers, especially those are are visually impaired make use of screen readers.
You can take advantage of knowing some basic HTML while using the Visual editor mode.
How? Let’s look at a couple of examples below…
Link Titles
To create a hyperlink you highlight the text you want to link, then click the paperclip icon 
to open the hyperlink details window.
You’ll see a few options.
- Link URL – The web address you would like to link to.
- Target – Whether you would like the link to open in the same browser window or a new browser window.
- Title – The text to be used for the Title tag of your link.
- Class – Gives your link a CSS styling definition. More on this in later articles covering design.
A basic search engine optimization trick that many new bloggers and business owners miss is making sure to enter relevant title tags for all of their text links.
Search engines scan this text and include it the decision they make concerning the content of your site, mathematically of course. These titles can also be seen if you hover your mouse over the links. Not only are you helping sites like Google to understand your content more, but you’re also helping those people using the assistance of screen readers as they also scan and read the title tags of hyperlinks.
Image Title and Descriptions
The same rule applies to images.
You should also be aware that there are two additional areas for adding relevant text to your images.
- Title – The text to be used for the Title tage of your link.
- Alternate Text – The text to be used in place of the image if the link is broken or if a visitor is blocking website images.
- Description – The description of the image.
To upload, insert and create an image hyperlink, put your cursor where you want the image to go and then click the image icon 
to open the image details window.
In short, adding any additional text to your links and images DOES help you.
It’s easy to ignore these important SEO steps, especially after spending a great deal of time crafting the perfect article, blog post or press release, but you will only be harming yourself and your website goals if you decide not to perform these simple steps.
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