The launch of HTML5 has simplified many tasks, but the same time it adds another layer of complexity in the area of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).
What is SEO?
In general It is the process of getting traffic from the “free”, “organic”, “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.
Multimedia in HTML5
Before HTML5 | After HTML5 |
Web designers/developers have used plug-ins such as Adobe Flash to add audio, video and graphics content to their projects | HTML5 allows for indexing multimedia content, such as menus, audio and video, with new tags |
Sites have traditionally suffered from poor search engine ranking due to webcrawler’s inability to index media content | The content within these tags can improve a site’s search engine ranking |
Link types
In past, developers used the “rel” attribute on link tags to mention which links that a web crawler should not follow
For Eg:
In HTML5, set of new values for the “rel” attribute of the link tag allow users to build a context for a document that, moving forward, should provide highly improved search results:
Let us have a look into new values for “rel” attribute
Alternate : To specify alternate content, the same text in PDF format for example
Author: To link to an author’s profile. This is of great benefit on Google if the author is signed up to Google+.
Bookmark : Lets blogs link to an article’s permanent URL.
Help: To be used by third party apps to provide access to help files. Invaluable for web-based apps.
License: Provides a link to licensing information.
Next and Prev: Used when a document is part of a series, giving context to the current page.
Search: Provides a link to a resource that can be used to search through the current document and its related pages.
For more details visit: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.12
Few great features of HTML 5 include the easily indexable tags that it will include. First and foremost HTML 5 will improve page segmentation. The way that it will do this is “footer”, “header”, and even “nav” tags. This will prove to be very helpful for SEO.