New elements in HTML5 good for SEO?
Today i read about some of the new elements in HTML5, and was thinking if these where good for SEO.
My conclusion so far is a bold no. Search engines already pick up content on websites, and manages to get relevant keywords and keyphrases, i don’t think the ability to easier tell the navigation apart from the content, is going to help them much in deciding the relevancy, this might be the case in the future though.
The navigation can make up a good chunk of a website, and mess with the keywords/relevancy of a site, but only if search engines don’t know that its the navigation column. They have ways to figure this out i believe, but the html nav tag might make it easier.
The other elements that i read about, is not really of much help to SEO. Its always a good idea to aim for semantic markup, and valid pages. But to be honest, this doesn’t really matter as much as some novice SEOS make it sound like. Google stated so them self in one of the videos on youtube.
The article tag is a nice addition to our arsenal, and used together with the section tag, it may even improve semantics of our site. I just don’t think this will have any major impact on your rankings, neither positive or negative. Other tags, like header and footer, seems more to be bloat-tags, after all, why would anyone want a semantic meaning on header and footers?
Don’t get me wrong, HTML5 is very interesting, and has some very useful APIS, but aside from that, its all hype, with less to nothing to back it up.
