How Important is HTML5 for your SEO?

Jan. 13, 2011

Under: SEO

HTML5 and SEO According to Wikipedia, HTML5 is the, “next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web.”

What does that really mean? HTML5 is the newest update of HTML and it has some new features that hope to address the biggest problems associated with HTML 4.01. The biggest change is that HTML5 adds many new syntax elements which will help with the, “semantic-richness” or documents and the inclusion of multimedia and graphic content.

How does affect your SEO?

The ability to mark your content with more specific tags will certainly help search engines more effectively determine the type of content that is going to be displayed and the new tags incorporated in HTML5 will help search engines understand more accurately the actual content of your web pages. Improving the way that search engine crawlers interact with your web content will help web developers and marketers to improve and optimize their search engine rankings. Basically, HTML5 helps improve page segmentation and crawlability and allows websites to have more search-engine friendly functionality and multi-media content.

What do some of these new elements look like?

<section> tag. The new <section> tag can be used to segment a page into different sections with their own separate HTML heading.

<article> tag. The new <article> tag is one of the most important additions from a SEO standpoint. This tag is where you will place the majority of the content on your page and it lets developers mark separate entities on your page (a blog for example) and reduces the need for <div> tags, cleaning up the code so it’s easier for both humans and search engines to read. A single page can hold several <article> tags and each article may contain several <section> tags. All of these tags will help better structure pages for easier understanding.

<header> tag. This new tag helps to give developers much more flexibility in terms of headings. The tag is a lot like the <h1> tag but it can contain a whole different set of header tags (so you can create headers within headers) or even hard coded links, an important part of your SEO.

<footer> tag. This tag is fairly similar to the heading tag in that they can both be used multiple times on a single page. The footer tag will show up at the end of a section and is useful for items like blog posts where you have recurring page elements. Neither the header or footer tag have to sit within the standard header or footer of a page, making both of them ideal for repeating elements.

<nav> tag. This tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages (your internal navigation links). It is important when it comes to defining page rank distribution through your links and will help search engines understand the structure of your website more accurately.

These new tags are directly related to the standard structure of a page, but each one how has its own tag. There are many more new tags than these most importantly ones surrounding multimedia and graphics (<audio>, <video> etc) and will help with further segmentation and categorization of content.

The adoption of HTML5 is continuing at a rapid pace and the success developers are having is a hot topic, especially since with the release of Internet Explorer 9, all of the major web browsers now support it. Are you using HTML5 to develop websites? We’d love to hear your opinions about HTML5 and it’s adoption.

Image by bioxid on Flickr.