Hah! HTML 5 is viral. You see the tidings about HTML 5 on almost every Webmaster and SEO related blogs and forums. You get to see more and more website switching to HTML 5 and we also see exclusive directories of websites developed with HTML 5 markup. So HTML 5 is whirling th web. See the Google Treds chart for HTML 5.
If you already not know what has changed in HTML 5 have a look at my article Working with HTML5 – The Future of Web
Talking about SEO. HTML 5 is a boon for SEO. By implementing HTML 5 one can say that we can now allow seach engines to dissect and evaluate our pages more efficiently. Let us see how HTML 5 affects the SEO of a typical web page.
- The foremost thing is that the XML like structure. The HTML 5 markup is XML like structure, which is the most search engine friendly structure.
- Typically your web page consists of containers that are mostly <div> tags. be it your sidebar, your content, header or footer. making the search engine index complete page including text from headers and footers. Now you can let the search engine spider know what is your main content and what is your sidebar using the <section> <header> <article> and <aside> tags. The search engine spider would be able to index your content more efficiently
- Define your main content for the search engine to focus, using <article> </article> tag.
- The <header> and <footer> tags can tell define your page’s header and footer to the search engine. Aother good use of header would be to define a post’s meta content like title, date of publish etc inside an article.
- Embedded media like videos, and audio can be optimized well enough simply like this. <video> the alternate text or the search engine friendly text </video>
- So I would suggest you to keep you eye open on HTML 5 markup as this can seriously increase your SEO score. But the sad part is that there are still many browsers that do no keep them selves updated with the latest markup. So it may take years to practically implement HTMl 5 on your website if you don’t want to compromise with your traffic
But the key thing to mention here is that CURRENTLY google et al doesnt give a hoot about HTML5 and wont give html5 sites any boost in rankings…and whilst most sites are built to support IE6 this looks like a 20+year thing to implement before it becomes successful!
Sounds interesting, but like Mark commented on there currently aren’t any real benefits in the SERPs. Maybe in 20 years, but we’ll probably be doing this all some other way by then.