HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, and HTML 5.0 is the fifth version of the programming language used to create web pages. This begs the question, what is going to be the effect on SEO? From an initial look, it appears as though the changes are going to be very beneficial through the addition of techniques such as ’segmentation’. Segmentation will allow search engines to break down a page and then analyse each part on an individual basis.
So why is this important? Well, ultimately it will enhance a search engines understanding of the page and enable it to more accurately decide upon it’s relevance. This will make it much easier to prioritise the content of your website by showing the search engine where your content is, which is especially useful for complex websites that are very code intensive.
So how does the segmentation work? It’s very easy to implement. There are a host of new tags including:
- <article> for articles
- <nav> for navigation
- <header> for the header
- <footer> you get the idea…
- <audio>
- <video>
- etc
Once HTML 5.0 starts to become more popular with websites, search engines will be able to use segmentation on websites which will change the way you search engine optimise a website. It may be sometime before these techniques come into effect, but it is very important that SEO companies start planning for these changes and are aware of the potential effects and benefits. However, although HTML 5 looks very interesting it is still really in a draft stage (and probably will be for several years) and IE 8 and Firefox 8 have mostly no support for it! Safari and Opera also have some support for it, but given how small their holding is it will be a long time before anyone uses it in a production environment.
