Almost everyone is touting HTML5 as the flash killer and a new horizon for web development. I wanted to take a slightly closer look at the HTML structure and possible implementations to see the effect on SEO.
Initial predictions were late 2010 however the first public working draft deadline was missed by 8 months and it is currently still in the working draft stage at the present time. Ian Hickson now expects the specification to reach candidate recommendation by 2012. It is expected that many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products well before then though so best be ready for the inevitable questions.
HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that will allow developers to be more verbose about the layout of the page. Present day HTML relies on multiple <div> and <span> tags that are styled through CSS. HTML5 allows for more verbose markup for navigation (<nav>), multimedia (<audio> and <video>) as well as allowing new APIs such as <canvas> elements to allow 2D drawing. For those into microformats HTML5 will incorporate Microdata as a simple way to embed semantic markup into HTML documents.
The more intuitive markup will help show the crawlers which are menu based links and which ones are from the content of the page. Google already has technology to identify this and with the reasonable surfer model in practise this will be a less significant change in my opinion.
Far more significant in my opinion will be Google javascript crawling ability will have to get a whole lot better.
Let’s go through an example. Look at the source of http://html5demos.com/database , an application that they use the web database API in HTML5 to store the tweets and then display them in the screen below. See any tweets in the html code? The pre rendered html only contains “<li>None loaded up yet 
</li>”.
This would be the same as an AJAX web developer using the onload event to inject the content into predefined html tags in HTML 4. While Google claims to crawl AJAX is flaky at best in my opinion.
Personally I think HTML5 will allow developers and designers to create a next generation of awesome applications within the web sphere. This level of creativity has been thwarted until now by the accessibility and crawlability issues inherent in Adobe Flash.
SEOs will need to understand the different APIs and be able to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using them from a search engines’ perspective.
For more information have a look at the list below:
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Interesting post and I’d love for the next revisions to be released, however looking at the current web browser market share indicators as well as overall web analytics there is still a shocking amount of IE6 users out there. Given the fact that the current main browsers don’t yet support it, and a fair amount of people still visit my website using Firefox 1.0.x the last thing I want to do is limit my user base compatibility then make my website slightly more optimized. Cheers.
Josefina Argüello – Search Engine Optimization
[...] had a great post about “The Need for Speed in Site Performance and CRO” and one about HTML 5 and SEO. Both pieces of gold you should absolutely [...]