HTML5 and its Impact on SEO

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Seach engine pptimization (SEO) is incredibly important to a lot of site owners and so it makes sense that people are asking how HTML5 will impact search engine algorithms. Adam Heitzman took an initial stab at figuring out how certain HTML5 features might affect your opitimization efforts.

One key component of HTML5 is that it adds new elements that help us better express what’s on a web page. This helps improve web page segmentation so that different parts — such as the header, footer, main content area, etc. — can be easily be distinguished from one another....The benefit of this is that it will allow search engines to easily crawl the website, possibly skipping sections such as <footer> or <header> or using them for different indexing purposes (such as identifying copyright information or finding the site’s name or logo). Search engine indexing will thus be more efficient, meaningful and possibly more advanced.

I'm really happy to see this being fleshed out and Adam touches on:

  • The new semantic tags
  • Web page segmentation
  • The new link types
  • <video> and <audio>

It'd be great to see more detail into how other features affect it and even how the greater reliance of JavaScript may affect how crawlers view your pages. I recently gave an HTML5-related talk and this was a topic that was on the mind of a couple of attendees so I'm glad we're starting to dig into this.