Last updated: November 1, 2026.
When doing SEO, we work with developers from time to time. And sometimes we need to open the page source in Chrome and look at something. This is exactly where knowing HTML gives you a big advantage.
I’m not talking about “learning HTML” here. I think it’s enough for an SEO specialist to know enough HTML to understand the page Google reads.
Do users and Google see the same page?
At first glance it seems like yes. But actually, not quite.
When a user looks at a page, they see the design, the colors, the buttons, the images.
Google, on the other hand, reads the page’s code. First it gets the source code from the server, then it runs the JavaScript and looks at the resulting page. In other words, the structure behind the design we see.
That’s why a page that looks great can sometimes be quite problematic from Google’s point of view.
Have you ever opened the page source?
Go to any page in Chrome. Right-click. Choose View page source or press CTRL + U.
You’ll see hundreds of lines of code. At first glance it looks a bit complicated. But on the SEO side, there are really only a few sections we look at all the time.
It’s worth getting to know Chrome DevTools too
There’s also another screen most people confuse with it. Chrome DevTools, which opens with Inspect or F12.
View Source and DevTools aren’t the same thing. View Source shows the source code that comes from the server. DevTools shows the page the browser has built at that moment.
On the SEO side, both come in handy from time to time. Seeing this difference can be important, especially on sites that run on JavaScript. We’ll come back to this when we cover JavaScript SEO in Chapter 23.
Title
We talked about it in Chapter 14. The page’s title. In the source code you’ll see a line similar to this:
<title>The Best Coffee Machine Recommendations</title>This is one of the titles Google sees.
Meta description
Right below it, you’ll usually find a line like this:
<meta name="description" content="...">Google may use it. It may not. But we still write it for the user.
H1
The page’s main heading. For example:
<h1>The Best Coffee Machine Recommendations</h1>It’s usually the big heading the user sees when they land on the page.
H2 and H3
These make up the sections of the post. For example:
<h2>Drip Coffee Makers</h2>
<h2>Espresso Machines</h2>
<h3>Who should choose one?</h3>You can think of these like the chapter headings of a book. They tell both the user and Google how the content is organized.
The URL is an important part of HTML too
Sometimes we only look at the source code. But we forget the URL.
Think about it this way. site.com/p?id=38473 and site.com/coffee-machines don’t say the same thing.
I prefer URLs that are readable, short and describe the topic whenever possible. Because the user sees it too. And so does Google.
What else can we see in HTML?
When examining the source code, you may sometimes see lines like this:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">The <a> tag here represents a link. href shows the address the link points to. rel="nofollow" gives Google additional information about this link.
In the backlinks chapter (Chapter 27), we’ll talk about these attributes in much more detail:
- Follow
- Nofollow
- Sponsored
- UGC
For now, it’s enough to know that these are normal structures you can see in HTML.
You don’t need to memorize HTML
I think the biggest mistake here is this. People learning SEO start watching HTML courses.
I don’t think that’s really necessary. Because our job isn’t software development.
But knowing what these tags do when we see them gives a big advantage:
We’ll go through most of these one by one in later chapters anyway.
Speaking the same language as developers
I think this is the biggest benefit of knowing HTML. For example, when you tell a developer:
The H1 is wrong.
you both know what you mean. Or when you say:
The canonical tag points to the wrong URL.
the conversation moves much faster.
I think the goal of an SEO specialist isn’t to write code. It’s to be able to understand what the code does.
How do I look at HTML?
I’ve been working on internet projects for about 25 years. And still, when I start a new project, one of the first things I do is open the page’s source code.
Because sometimes you can spot in 30 seconds in the source code a problem you can’t see on the screen. A missing title, a wrong canonical, a noindex tag or a purely technical error… Sometimes the answer to problems that would keep you busy for hours is right there.
You don’t have to know all of HTML. But understanding the structure through which Google reads the page is a big advantage for anyone doing SEO.
For me, that’s exactly the most important side of HTML.
Previous: Chapter 15: How to Write Content Google Will Love · Contents · Next: Chapter 17: How Do Images Affect SEO?
This chapter was first published in Turkish on X (September 16, 2026).