The Benefits Of HTML5 For SEO

Search engine ranking has always been a major concern for webmasters and developers world-wide, and when it comes to SEO, you can never truly call yourself an expert. Google is always struggling to create better algorithms in order to prevent unethical practices, and this is why specialists are constantly faced with new challenges.

Choosing an efficient SEO strategy is much like playing a guessing game, because Google, Bing and Yahoo! refuse to reveal their algorithm secrets. With HTML, XML and JavaScript came the dawn of a new age: the age of SEO, a practice which has become recognized as a major and complex industry.

Also See - Matt Cutts: Is WordPress Or Blogger Better For SEO?

HTML5 may not be the newest thing under the sun, but it has become an essential tool for many experts. There has been a lot of idle chatter regarding HTML5. While some made extremely optimistic forecasts, others had a more presumptuous approach on it. This new language includes many tags and elements that will help you improve the semantic value of your site, and make it easier to compartmentalize and display to visitors. Those who thought that it will give them higher SERPs scores may have been wrong, but the truth is that HTML5 is very useful to SEO for many reasons. Here are a few tags that will make your life easier:

<FOOTER> and <HEADER> TAGS:

The <header> tag is considered the holy grail of  HTML5 by SEO developers. It is much like the <h1> tag, but it is more flexible because it incorporates the H1, H2 and H3 elements plus a lot of content and hard-coded links. The <footer> tag will enable you to provide useful information in the lower part of the page. It may not be as important as the <header> tag, but it still plays an important part in the layout of the page.

<NAV> TAG:

Another excellent addition to the HTML5 language is the <nav> tag which is capable of sorting collections of links from other sites. It is no need to stress how this aspect will benefit SEO.

<SECTION> TAG:

People are more likely to read an article which is structured in headers, or bullets. This is why HTML5 has made segmentation better. Titles, footers, and links are now considered separate entities which will make search engine crawlers read faster. Moreover, the <section> tag will help webmasters separate entries with ease. This tag can be accompanied by <article> or <div> tags which will keep the code cleaner. 

HTML5 In 2013:

Although the above mentioned tags seem to be the easiest to use, they are actually poorly explained, and usually not implemented correctly. I believe that HTML5 is an interesting concept, but for most, it may be too complex, and sadly too vague. However, when done right, it can result in brilliant pages. Let me pleasure you with two amazing examples: The Wilderness Downtown and Soul Reaper.

What HTML5 Offers:

The two websites are clear examples that HTML5 has another kind of user experience in mind. If your goal is to rank higher on Google by back-linking, keyword use, you should probably stick to regular HTML, but HTML5 has some exciting things to offer:

• It is the perfect choice for mobile apps and games
• It is crawler friendly and easy to index
• The new tags make it easier to organize content
• Sites rich in visual and audio content will benefit from it

How SEO Benefits From HTML5:

HTML5 can indeed be useful for certain sites, but this doesn't mean that you should all abandon the older languages and start over. While sites which are heavily reliant on Flash have only to gain from this complex language, regular sites might be better of without it. The other thing brilliant thing about it is that it can be more easily crawled by search engine spiders. In other words, animations and videos can now be read by engines. As a result, a site which is mostly interactive and which contains a lot of multimedia (that was initially invisible to the crawlers) can now drive organic search traffic.

As far as mobile internet is concerned, HTML5 will revolutionize the world of apps and the general usability perspective. iPhone and iPads may not be compatible with Flash, but this is no longer a problem. Considering that the most popular experiences for smartphone users require a lot of multimedia content, HTML5 is a welcome change.

Conclusion:

To conclude, I am not saying that HTML5 is the miraculous answer to all our questions, but it has the power to change the user experience and the global standards for years to come. Nevertheless, HTML5 coding is extremely tricky, and it should only be done by certified experts.