Hani Girgis - Digital Marketing Story

By Author: Krisha Franz
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HTML 4.01 has been in use for almost 10 years now, until recently when HTML5 morphed out of it as the new standard for website content and functionality, and it continues to evolve ever since then. Latest web browsers like Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox have adapted well to this latest web standard and continue to make their latest versions adapt to its features.

HTML5 has a number of elements that help online marketers to carry out effective SEO by way of its technical enhancements and improved features. It is however important for them to understand in detail, why does HTML5 matter for their SEO efforts.

To start with, here is how HTML5 can help with SEO:

1. New Semantic Tags and Geolocation Microdata Elements

HTML5 has new elements to offer that enable a better structure of the site viz. header tags, article tags and nav tags. You can make search engines understand and index simple content such as ratings/reviews, company events, people and products by using Geolocation Microdata.

SEO benefits: The cleaner code enables webpages to be efficiently searched and indexed. Also, the download time ...
... for webpages decreases significantly. Google identifies and presents the information in a better manner by virtue of the rich snippets generated by webmasters with the help Microdata.

2. New Media Elements

HTML5 brings along a new standard for multimedia content without the need for a plugin by a third party vendor. For instance, playing audio or video on a webpage had no set standard practice until HTML5 came into being. Generally, third party plugins such as flash are required to play audio and video files, however same plugins are not shared by all browsers. By using HTML5, you can directly build videos into browsers that support it and enable fast video downloads.

SEO benefits: Search engines better index and search HTML5 videos. Videos are ultra-fast and are browser based. Also, slower internet connections can have a better browsing experience without video buffering since the downloading and playing both take place in HTML5.

The independence from a third party vendor’s plugin makes HTML5 more companionable with mobile gadgets which classically have restricted memory resources. The benefit of this video element for SEO is due to the fact that you can do away with much coding in order to be able to set in the video. Also, the video tag enables a search engine crawler to be more discerning as to what is this code for.

3. Canvas Element

This is a new pixel based graphic area that enables drawing charts, graphics and graphic visuals on a webpage.

SEO benefits: It provides greater stability as compared to a plugin since the browser includes the Canvas.

4. Local Client Side Storage

Cookies have not proved to be the right solution for storing huge volumes for data since every request forwards them to the server making it unproductive and sluggish. HTML5 uses data only when called for and it does not practice passing data on every server request. Data is stored and accessed using Javascript. This storage function benefits web apps and emails the maximum.

SEO benefits: You can leave the website’s performance unaffected even after storing large amounts of data.

5. Form Elements

The forms have been equipped with more variety and functionality viz. date, time, URL, email, calendar, search etc.

SEO benefits: These new form options provide better design and functionality on mobile devices.

6. Multi-tasking capabilities through Web Workers

HTML5 has made web browsers capable of multitasking through Web Workers. The benefit of a feature as Web Worker is that the browser does not get locked up even when several processes are operating in it. Javascript used in the past could not even handle heavy computing. Scripts that would run for long also used to get timed out. The features of Web Workers are somewhat similar to the traditional Java or C# multi-threaded applications. Two of the uses that Web Workers come handy for are doing exhaustive numerical calculations and updating client-side databases.

SEO benefits: Web Workers give a greater flexibility to the developer in separating the content from code intended for processing tasks.

The above mentioned features of HTML5 and the SEO benefits that they bring along bear enough testimony to the fact that HTML5 is the new standard in markup for presenting webpages.

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