«
»

A Focus on Search Engine Friendly Elements of HTML 5 for SEO Purposes

HTML 5 is a development of HTML 4.01. It is a new dimension to web design and development in the age of Web 2.0. It is likely to introduce new concepts and make potential changes in the field of web design and development. The impact of HTML 5 on search engine optimization is not to be sneered at, though it is not as important for SEO experts as for designers and developers. Web pages with HTML 5 coding are supposed to be search engine friendly.

HTML 5 has resulted from the evolution of the internet over the past few years. It is an advanced coding tool with several useful tags and elements. An XML based presentation language; it looks complex only at first glance. Not much different from HTML 4, it ensures backward compatibility. Worries to learn this design coding language from scratch are groundless.

Search engines have come up with more advanced checking tools to pick up the best optimized sites. A website with segmentation of its pages into several parts like main content, menus, headers, footers, links etc. is search engine friendly. A web master needs not segment a page if it is coded in HTML 5 as the segmentation of web pages is bound to occur in HTML 5.

The new <article> tag is one of the best contributions of HTML 5 to webpage design from a SEO perspective. The tag makes it possible to mark separate parts of a webpage in an online publication. The content inside the <article> tag is given more weight than the content in other parts by search engines. Moreover, there is no need of <div> tags with the use of the <article> tag.

The identification of separate sections on a webpage is easier with the new <section>tag in HTML 5. The upside of this tag is that each segment of a webpage retains its individuality with a separate HTML heading. Search engines are more attentive to the content of individual sections than to that of the whole. The keywords in separate sections gain higher relevance in search engine result pages.
Web pages with new <header> tags in HTML 5 are flexible enough to contain a lot of stuff. It is a boon to the ranking of websites in search engines. It includes several heading elements like H1, H2, and H3 with lots of content. It allows SEO experts to put more and more content in web pages with HTML 5 coding.
The new <footer> tag though not as important as the tag in HTML 5 is useful for SEO purposes. Web pages with separate <footer> tags are flexible enough to be crawled easily by search engine spiders. Navigability of web pages is a vital factor for the search engine ranking of websites. The new <nav> tag in HTML 5 easily identifies the links from one page to another to facilitate navigation across the pages.
No doubt, HTML 5 pages are sure to be in the cache of search engines. Rethink, if you are going to have your web pages coded in HTML 4. I have focused on some search engine friendly elements of HTML 5 that are effective enough to make web pages flexible, indexable and navigable from SEO perspectives.

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 3:40 am and is filed under SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “A Focus on Search Engine Friendly Elements of HTML 5 for SEO Purposes”

  1. Toshiko Sorn Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 3:40 pm

    Thanks for sharing this.

Leave a Reply