You’ve most likely heard about HTML5 a bunch of times now, right? But what’s cool about it for the SEO community and can it influence your site’s rankings or it’s just a gimmick? If that’s what you’re wondering about, I got you covered. Afer reading the post you’ll have a clear understanding if you need HTML5 at all.
This post will touch on the benefits that HTML5 has to offer from an SEO point of view, such as simplicity, ease of use, less code and the features that previously required JavaScript if you wanted to implement them.
Related Posts:
Is HTML5 Important for SEO?
5 Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign
!DOCTYPE
This is going to catch your eye right away. If a site is built with HTML5, it starts just with <!DOCTYPE html> instead of that massive piece of … code that you were supposed to use before. Even judging from the first innovation, you can guess what HTML5 is all about. You got it! It’s about making the web a cleaner and better place. And since less code is good for SEO, you can already tell that SEOs should take advantage of it.
New Semantic HTML5 Tags
For starters, let’s see what semantic tags are. A semantic tag is just an HTML tag that makes sense to human beings. For example, <div> is not a semantic tag because it’s kinda hard to guess what it means. Whereas <header><navigation><aside>(you can use it for sidebars), <footer> are perfect illustrations of semantic tags that HTML5 has to offer. I’m sure it’ll simplify things for Google as well because it’ll be pretty easy to say if a link is in the footer or not. Google can do it now anyway, but it spends energy for its algo to figure it out. From now on, if a link is within the <footer></footer> tags, it’s definitely a footer link. Does that make sense?
Do Stuff without JavaScript
Back in the day, if you wanted to create a progress bar, a meter or enable email verification on your site, you had to hire a JS dude or even learn the basics of JavaScript on your own to make that damn thing work. Now, HTML5 allows you to implement all those features with a click of a button or two. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you don’t need JS any more. If you want to create, say, the scrolling parallax effect, you’ll just have to use (at least paste) some JavaScript. The point that I’m trying to make here is that you’ll need JavaScript less often.
New Input Types
The thing that I’m really excited about is the new email input type. For starters, if you use that new email input type, mobile browsers will display a customized keyboard for entering specifically an email address. You can also actually use the built-in browser email validation that HTML5 brings to the table. Long story short, if you define a certain input field as email, it’ll throw out errors if the user enters something that does not look like an email address. Though this feature has its drawbacks, because it has loopholes and is not reliable enough, you may want to use it if you need some really simple email validation and you don’t really want to mess around with any scripting. Here’s how it looks:
<form>
<input type=”email”>
<input type=”submit”>
</form>
Also, now you can use the URL and phone number input types in your forms, which allow you to make sure that the user enters the data you actually need from it.
<form>
<input type=”url”>
<input type=”tel”>
</form>
Again, these features don’t really add on too much in terms of SEO, but there’s indirect influence, because - like I said before - those features can be implemented without JS, which usually slows down your site quite a bit.
Local Storage
As an SEO, you may be doing blog commenting for your site or just for your customers. Are you familiar with the situation when you invest like half an hour for composing a comment to a blog post and when you click “Submit”, the session turns out to be expired? Been there? And the new local storage feature can be used to safely store your comment before you hit the “Submit button”. Which means more saved nerves for you.
Conclusion
The benefit of using HTML5 is that it makes your site faster because you use less code and the features that used to require JS can be implemented with HTML only. So, there’s a positive influence of HTML5, but it may be not that big as we in the SEO community expected. In either case, it’s a step in the right directly and we totally need to use what it offers, because it’ll make our SEO lives a bit easier and more productive.
on
I think working with HTML5 seems to be very easy and very effective. But, I wanted to know how much effective will it be when working on HTML5 rather than WordPress or Blogger??
on
HTML 5 is a leap forward. The versatility in site designs you have with HTML cannot be ignored by the SEO community.
on
I think HTML 5 is having many new semantic elements
like microdata tags which will optimize any
website (especially sites which uses heavy flash
elements) and makes it a favorable bet for the
search engine bots to easily parse and index
your site, even though HTML 5 has been made for humanity advance and not some Google crawlers. HTML 5 also renders usability, design
flexibility and strong markups. So, I think all these
factors will indirectly help in increasing your site ranking. Thanks for sharing.
on
Pretty Nice blog! We can now say our SEO works will speed up, but getting use to this system however still a nightmare for me.
on
This is interesting and great to know! I am just now getting back into HTML and web design; and I didn’t realize all the changes because the last time I made a website was back in 2003(long time ago, haha.) HTML5 seems a little easier from what I am used to doing. : )
on
I have heard that the new semantic is basically helpful to get your site rank well just for the mere fact of using HTML5, but of course there are many good reasons to make the shift, including that you can get things done faster, better and using way too much less coding.
on
The new input types is what I was best looking forward to as well. In today’s world, mobile browsing is only increasing in popularity, this will definitely help with the responsive designs.