The proper way to set the background color of an tag to be blue in HTML is by using inline CSS styling. Inline CSS allows you to apply styles directly to individual HTML elements.
The correct HTML code snippet for this purpose is:
```
Hello
```
Explanation:
1. ``: This is the HTML tag for the heading level 1.
2. `style="background-color: blue;"`: This inline style attribute is used to define the background color of the element. In this case, "blue" specifies the color of the background.
3. `Hello`: This is the text content that will be displayed within the element.
By using the style attribute with the background-color property set to "blue," you can effectively change the background color of the element to blue. This method ensures that the styling is applied specifically to the element without affecting other parts of the document.