If you’re in our industry and haven’t seen anything on HTML 5 yet you seriously must have been in a cave. It’s basically a new version of the core mark-up language on the web and it massively reduces the dependency on the plug-ins we are all so used to seeing.
HTML5 is already rocking the design and development worlds with people clambering to experiment with new functionality, APIs and more but we should always look at all the potential affects of such large shifts in our behaviour and this post aims to address some potential implications the new mark-up will have for SEO.
The first thing to consider is that HTML5 is still a baby really, most browsers have some level of support but few have total support and even then many functions are yet to be completed or fully tested. Because of this any SEO issues or benefits are very much speculation at this stage, while we are running multiple tests to help discover search engine reactions to HTML5 code until it is more mainstream I do not believe these will be definite.
Being prepared never hurt anyone though so lets take a look at some of the more important changes and how they could affect your SEM strategy.
HTML5 introduces new elements designed specifically for showing the different parts of a web page, these new elements are;
- section
- article
- footer
- audio
- video
- nav
- canvas
- progress
- time
- aside
- hgroup
- meter
Page Elements
I believe this is going to be one of the most important changes for SEO.
The first important thing the tags allow is the ability for Google to extract sections of a site for different purposes. What many refer to as “Boilerplate” text in footers, headers and navigation can now be easily found and dealt with by Google. This brings positive and negative implications. It’s likely less emphasis will be placed on links in the footer section however Google already claim to be able to identify and do this so marking up your Footer could help with PR control through the rest of the links on your site.
Secondly identifying your navigation could be very valuable for breadcrumb and site-link inclusion. If search engines like Google know that a specific list of links on your site are your top level navigation then they are clearly a lot more use as site-links than 5 random pages from your site. Since Google claims it focuses on the user it would make perfect sense for them to take this info.
Media
Elements like audio and video have immediate advantages. Firstly they non longer require plug ins and therefore search engines can work with standard sets of API’s to easily crawl and identify media content and include it within the index. This means more content in the index and hopefully more users to your site.
Additionally we can also assume that the search engines would want to give users more “compatible” media since more users would have access to it (the ones without the plug-ins). We know that Google are trialling HTML5 on YouTube right now and in the long run it is likely to become a standard for them.
I would also expect improved loading times and more advanced functionality in the future as the HTML5 video and audio API evolve.
Content
The article and section elements may become very important for on-site SEO content. Correctly using them will help Google identify stolen or duplicate content and may also encourage the future use of rich snippets in search results.
The different elements should also integrate well with RDFa and Dublin Core protocol giving us lots of opportunity to format the semantic web without the use of too many of those nasty spans. Much discussion of microdata and HTML5 is still up in the air, so this is one to watch as it develops.
Well that’s all we have for now, remember the biggest change is that you are going to start telling search engines what each part of your document is, this is going to have positive and negative effects but if your are a real user focused SEO then none of it should be a problem.
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Search engine optimizers work in unison with content writers. The latter drafts content in the form of articles, blogs, press-releases, etc to attract the visitors with interesting content. This content is crucial for any website. Content is written with proper and related keyword-stuffing. SEOs attach links with these keywords. The end result is that visitors reach the website through search engine results.
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