HTML5 and SEO

posted by Lisa - 15:52 22/08/11

Having recently started to build websites using HTML5 I was keen to know if creating a site in HTML5 had benefits from an SEO objective.

Some of the new features in HTML5 are functions for embedding audio, video, and graphics. I am more interested in what HTML5 has to offer in regards to semantic elements like <header>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside> and <footer>. 

During my first attempt to build an HTML5 site, it became obvious of the advantages of using these new tags.  Using them together with the heading elements (h1 to h6) it  provided me with a cleaner way to mark up nested sections with header levels, beyond the six levels possible compared to earlier versions of HTML.

Happy enough with the semantics, I was a little concerned about the introduction of allowing multiple h1 tags on a page.  It was to my understanding of recent years that the h1 tag had been regarded as one of the more important factors of SEO and a prime placement for important keyword related content.  I was always under the impression that having multiple h1 tags on a page is not only bad semantics but also a black hat method of SEO.

It would seem that of late this theory is no longer relevant and the h1 tag has lost its high regard among the SEO experts. The underlying semantic meaning of what an h1 heading tag actually represents has changed in HTML5.  An h1 tag in HTML4 would be used semantically to represent the heading for the entire webpage whereas in HTML5 the h1 tag represents the heading for a particular section.

With my h1 issue resolved I was eager to find out what SEO expert’s thoughts on HTML5 were, and how using it could be an advantage for SEO.

Here are some early theories:

• The <article> tag provides a cleaner mark up option to define an important area of the page. This can only be seen as a benefit and it will reduce the need to use <div> tags. It is also a possibility that search engines will put more weight on the text inside the <article> tag compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.
• The <section> tag will be more commonly used to separate content within an article. This will also give the advantage of allowing each section to have its own separate HTML heading.
• Many experts are seeing the <nav> tag as the most important tag from an SEO point of view as it can be used to identify a collection of links which are on other pages.
• HTML5 will improve Page Speed as the file size will be smaller. Page Speed has been talked about in many blogs recently, with a general view that it is considered as a factor within Google’s Algorithm.

Other than these theories, the general consensus is that HTML5 provides ‘Improved page segmentation’ which can only help provide search engines with clearer relevant information, yet it is also too early to know how the search engines are using the new tags in their algorithm. Only time and experimentation will tell, but I think as more websites become HTML 5-compliant, I am sure search engines will pay more attention to HTML 5. Only then may it be possible to know how exactly search engines will treat pages created using HTML5....so let’s all dive into the 5!