As much as the internet is abuzz with news of HTML5 and all its potential, unless you’re a web developer you probably haven’t given it much thought. But wait, will this new HTML standard affect your SEO in any way? Should you start tuning up your websites so that you aren’t left behind?
Being a modification to the code of websites itself, SEO is bound to be affected by HTML5 in various ways.
After all, when search engine spiders crawl all over your website they don’t ‘see’ it the way that you do. Instead, they just view the code – and so search engines are going to have to react in some way or other to the presence of new HTML5-based tags.
If you’re frantic with worry about what sort of reaction will that be and how much is it going to affect how you structure your websites – don’t be. All things said and done, the jury is still out as to how search engines will evaluate the updates to HTML’s markup code, so there’s no point jumping the gun and starting to panic just yet.
What is known however is that HTML5 has included a number of interesting tags that will help search engines identify certain parts of your website more accurately. Some of these interesting tags include: <header>, <footer>, <article>, <section>, and <nav>.
From the names alone, you should be able to guess their purpose – and in a nutshell these tags will help search engines to identify exactly how your page is segmented, and know which sections the header is, the navigation bar, the footer, and so on.
Mind you, there are other tags too, such as <video> and <audio>.
Once again, as of right now the impact that these tags have on SEO is nonexistent and will probably remain that way until more websites start moving into HTML5. Once that happens, it is reasonable to assume that search engines might desire these tags around so that their spiders are better able to figure out exactly how websites are structured.
For now, there’s no need to make any changes to your existing websites. Just keep abreast with current developments and be informed of how SEO is changing.
If you’re designing a new website however, it might be worth working HTML5 tags into it. Not only will it help your HTML code look a lot cleaner, but when SEO actually takes that inevitable first step towards it, you’ll be in pole position!