Firstly, the best practice for making sure that your website has all of the appropriate tags is to use a HTML template to start each time. This way you can be sure that your page is starting with a solid foundation.

Here is a template that you can copy and save:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title></title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Tags are used to define elements in your code and are what allow your webpage to display properly in a browser. Below are the ten most common tags and what they are used for:

<h1> thru <h6> These tags are headings and they go from <h1> being the largest to <h5> which is the smallest. These can be used as titles among other things.
<p> This tag is for paragraphs.
<i> This tag shows the text it surrounds in italics, <em> can also be used.
<b> This tag shows the text it surrounds as bold, <strong> can also be used.
<a> This is the anchor tag. This is used to create links to either an external or internal page, an ftp server, or even an email address.
<ul> and <li> The <ul> tag creates an unordered list which displays all of your list elements <li> as bullet points.
<blockquote> This tag displays a quote in an indented block but it should only be used for long quotes.
<hr> This tag draws a horizontal line across the page, usually used for breaks in content.
<img> This tag is used to display an image but must also include src and alt. Src is the source file for the image and alt is a description of the image
<div> This tag is a "dummy" tag and it is used to group block elements that can then be formatted using CSS

While these are the ten most common tags we will be adding more specialized tags and exploring more functionality later on.