HTML5 – Does it really help in improving search rankings?

Search Engine Optimization is really an incredible aspect which has capability to draw immense traffic and make your brand popular across wide region. With the advent of HTML5, it is necessary to weigh up the potential impact the new standards will have on search engine rankings. Does HTML5 can really impact your search rankings? This is the buzz question and has been debated in various places across the web.

Usually, most of Web SEO has been focused on the Google search engine. People trust more and expect more for better and quality results from Google competitively and most businesses running online utterly rely on Google search results. Google is the front line technology and has been early to take on HTML5, in both through their browser (Chrome) and their search platform. Well, Google has no definite purpose to favor new technology, but adopting new technology helps keep your site modern which ultimately is a positive sing when it comes to usability and SEO effect.

Will HTML5 Boost Your Site Rankings?

HTML5 contains number of new features and techniques but a harsh truth about HTML5 is, many of its features don’t have SEO impact. There are lots of debates running regarding HTML5 for SEO, many of them are misleading and most probably wrong but reality is HTML5 does affect SEO in both positive and negative way.  

Well, HTML5 semantic elements adopting into your website pages will not give your web page higher ranking but using semantic elements in right way could probably give positive effect on your web rankings. Though, there is eventually little amount of advantage added to rankings for semantic tags but we need to accept that the trivial use of semantic tags never affect the SEO. The difference would be small and most probably wouldn’t matter. The things that can really affect the SEO ranking these days are quality back links and quality content approach.

Improvements in HTML5 for SEO

HTML5 for Content Categorization

One significant improvement in HTML5 that could improve your SEO rankings is the ability to categorize the content with tag like <article>, <header> <footer > and <aside>.  Dividing page into different sections helps search engines easy to categorize the content. Since search engines are getting smarter and applying page segmentation and treat every part as separate entry, HTML5 is ideal one to use. The introduction of <nav> tag in HTML5 should help search engine quickly figure out the site structure which ultimately helps in faster site indexing and better opportunity to rank higher.

Treat Media Content Effectively

Earlier web designers were totally dependnt on plugins to add multimedia content on website. However, the problem with the websites those have adopted such method of adding rich graphic content through plugins on their sites is, they were suffering from very poor rankings because of inability of Google to index these types of content. But the scenario has totally changed with HTML5. HTML5 enrich making use of graphic content into websites through <video> and <audio> tags and these tags help Google to index these content quicker. These tags help Google to understand the rich media content used in website.

Added Advantage – More Meaningful Links

HTML5 has introduced large number of additional options for ‘rel’ attribute. Well, these options will identically help search engines to identify how to treat the links. This activity can provide greatly enhanced search results.

Newly added ‘rel’ attribute are:

License, alternate, bookmark, help, author, next, noreferrer, nofollow, prev, prefetch, search, tag

Final Words:

Even though, there are huge debates going on web world about HTML5 for SEO, reality remains that there are pros and crons of HTML5 on SEO. Even though it does help in pushing up the rankings, it’s still not very clear what level of impact HTML5 has on SEO. But it’s advisable to go for HTML5 because there seems to be more positive things and further enhancement in technology is going to take it forward  in being favorable for search engines .

About Author: Sem Jacobs is a creative web developer working at KGN Technologies since 2009. KGN Technologies involves experienced magento extension development team who are capable to develop and further customize Magento extensions to add fresh and unique flair to magento shop.

What’s the Fuss Around about HTML5!

HTML5 has been a popular trend over last few years now and has encouraged web developers to build a website which should be high in performance and accessibility.

Before we start talking about HTML5, it is necessary to first discuss little bit of HTML. Well, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a type of code that can be easily read by your web browser in order to display web pages properly. There was a time when developers were completely relying on HTML for preparing web documents and although as the time has passed and technology has evolved there wasn’t really any significant improvement in the basic HTML technology. This encouraged the developer’s team to come up with necessary improvements in this language that could be good to increase the website usability and performance which eventually resulted in the birth of HTML5.

HTML5 is a new version of HTML 4.1 and XHTML 1.0 focusing on the features which makes website building process even faster. HTML5 is still a work in progress but possibly HTML5 would get the green single from W3C in July 2014.

HTML5 has so many new syntactical features such as <audio>, <video> and <canvas> elements. As a result of these new features, it will be very easy to integrate multimedia and graphic content in website using the third party plugins. There are few other considered elements like <article>, <header>, <nav> and <section> which will improve the semantic value of the document.

Search Engine Friendly

Using flash to embed video on website is often loved by web developers. But search engines think differently.  Major robot crawlers find it very hard to read the content available in flash video. Without the support of SWFobject technology, search engines are clueless about video on website. But HTML5 <video> tag has changed the entire scenario and now with <video> tag you can embed video in your website as easy as like adding an image – no flash required.

With HTML5 developers can get lot of new elements and tags that help to improve SEO. Defining the content types using different attributes is one of the key steps to improve the search ranking of web pages. For instance, we need to define whether the block of content is heading, paragraph, price and address etc. This will help search engine to understand the content available on the page which ultimately results into fast indexing of web pages because search engines like to index the web pages that follow clean and clear structure.

Audio and Video Support

As mentioned above web developers used to depend a lot for embedding videos on website through flash, Flex, Silverligh and JavaScript tools. But HTML5 has been completely eradicated this comlexity and it has become extremely easy for developers to embed video and audio files using <audio> and <video> tag. Using HTML5 web developers can embed high quality videos, audio, high definition pictures, animation and charts and much more multimedia features easily without help of any third party plugins. 

Clean and Improved Code

HTML5 enable web designers to use neat and clear code. Many div tags can be removed using semantic HTML5 elements.

Enhanced Accessibility

If you really want your site to reach broad audience, you will need to design your site for easy accessibility. HTML5 is talented enough to improve website accessibility.

It does it in 2 ways – using semantics and ARIA.

Semantic HTML means HTML tags used in web page that describes the meaning of content rather than its presentation. The decoration of content will go in CSS section.

ARIA is a part of W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) which is used to make sure web content should be accessible easily. ARIA is used for improving the accessibility of dynamic content and advanced UI controls which are developed using HTML, JavaScript, AJAX and HTML and other related technologies.

Smarter Local Storage

Website cannot work without internet connection. But with HTML5, data can be stored in browser that means you can continue to perform your work, place orders and filling up form which can be sync up when you are online later.

Mobile Ready

As we can notice a rapid increase in mobile devices usage for internet browsing, adopting HTML5 technology will make your website mobile ready. As Adobe announced the death of mobile flash, HTML5 could be perfect option to make your website mobile browsing compatible. As mobile browsers have fully supported HTML5, in that case creating website mobile ready is become so easy.

Sem Jacobs is a expert front end developer who has successfully delivered above 100+ PSD to HTML conversion projects. He has excellent coding technique and write own code which ensures bug free, pixel perfect and quality web solutions.