Being on the web is no good until you are visible enough. The designers and developers who have dedicated themselves to creating brilliant websites for businesses of all scales and sizes, have always been baffled by the do’s and don’ts to follow in order to stay on the front pages of search results of the major search engines. With the progressive development tools and languages and tools, SEO has seen several ups and downs.
A good SEO analyst would know that the optimization of the website should ideally start from its natal stage- the designing and the development. The latest buzz of HTML5- The fifth generation Hyper Text Mark-up Language, has stirred some issues when it comes to SEO. Is it pro-SEO or not? HTML5 has been greeted warmly by the developers as it overcomes many shortcomings that were lacking in a development language till now. But how does it affect SEO? How are SEO analysts eyeing this latest development?
Search engines are getting smarter day by day. Analysts can no longer dupe the search engines by the so called “black hat” techniques. The recent updates from Google, namely the Penguin and the Panda update have further laid emphasis on good quality SEO and mainly on the content of the website, the related articles and blogs.
HTML5, with its better options for page segmentation spells good news for SEO. With page segmentation, the different parts of the page are treated differently and thus making it better for SEO.
Another, happier news is all the tags that HTML5 allows. There are new tags like
<article>
<section>
<header>
<footer> and
<nav> etc. These tags along with many others would lead to better identification of content.</nav></footer></header></section> What is important to understand here is that HTML5 greatly helps improve the experience and the usability of the website, anyway making it a better candidate for higher ranks in search results. Especially for websites that are rich in media (audio and video), HTML5 is pretty advantageous, yes, in terms of SEO too. HTML5 also has better options to offer in terms of crawling and indexing of websites.
HTML5 still has to penetrate deeper into the web to better know its effects on SEO and then can one work out better ways to use the latest version of HTML to the advantage of SEO.