As the newest standard for structuring content on the Internet, HTML5 is based on XML and is not that much different from its predecessor HTML4. There are, however, some major additions in HTML5 that can affect your website SEO.
One notable improvement is web page segmentation, which will separate a web page into parts such as headers, main content, or footers, enabling search engines to provide even more relevant search results. Another is the addition of HTML tags, which enable page segmentation. Learn more about these new tags and how to use them.
Tags
• Article Tag – <article>…</article>
Indicates the main content of the Web page. Search engines, during indexing, will consider the content within the article tags as more important than other content on the page. For SEO, the article tags will be extremely important.
• Section Tag – <section>…</section>
Indicates a specific section on the web page, making search engines understand better than before how a web page is structured. For example, a section can consist of several paragraphs marked with a subheading.
• Header Tag – <header>…</header>
Identifies the name and the logo of the site, making search engines aware where exactly these are located. The header tag will also represent the location where the main navigation links are placed on the web page
• Footer Tag – <footer>…</footer>
The footer section should indicate items such as copyright, social media links, and terms of use. However, as these items provide usually irrelevant information for a search engine, Google will probably not take into account the footer tag when ranking your site.
• Navigation Tag – <nav>…</nav>
Finally, the navigation tag acts similarly to a sitemap, helping the search engine’s crawler understand the architecture of the website.
Links
With HTML5, websites will be able to insert links straight into web pages. Links will be sorted according to the purpose they serve.
• External link sends to another website.
• Alternate link sends to an alternative version of the current web page.
• Help link sends to a help page within the website.
• License link sends to the license terms of the content on the current web page.
• Author link sends to a web page where more information can be found about the author of the current web page.
• Next link sends to the next web page on the site, usually relevant to the current page.
• Prev link sends to the previous web page on the site, usually relevant to the current page.
Moreover, search engines will be able to recognize the type of link used on the indexed page.
Media – <audio> and <video>
Audio and video files embedded on a web page will be indexed accordingly. Thanks to HTML5, audio and video will soon be indexed by search engines much like images are now. This makes the proper tagging of your media files all the more important.
As you can see, HTML5 does bring a few important changes to the web, in the form of page segmentation and HTML5 tags, both of which affect SEO. Try to use them to your advantage to improve the search engine indexing for your site.