HTML5: Performance Enhancing the Oncoming Decade
For many years, online marketers, and even a few developers, have been looking to fall in suit with Google, and thus promote their business to the community of the World Wide Web. This may be one of the best venues to do so, but for many content producers, who simply weren’t writers, they were falling short. This could be due to the fact that web markup makes sites rank, and there are several ways that this has been manipulated in the past. While we won’t go into the many ways googles ranking algorithm has been used and abused, we will talk about the future for content creators, and how it’s possible that HTML5 can be their saving grace. Let us get you up to speed on this technology and see if we can’t save your rankings while we’re at it.
Search Friendly or Search Deadly
The many functions of HTML5 can be overwhelming on an initial look, so we will cover one of the most important parts in regards to web markup. While things like geolocation, navigation, http caching and file API, are perfectly competent capabilities, marketers want to know how this technology can help Google ranking. HTML5 markup allows video producers, even game creators, access to the kinds of signals google robots, called spiders, are using to rank and catalog the web. On your typical webpage, there are several on-page elements that determine placement in the search engine results pages. With HMTL5 content, like games, and videos, can be read by the bots when containing such on-page elements.
No More Flash?
Let us take a little stroll down history lane. As much as web designers loved using flash to embed videos search engines did not. There were few tools to clue on the robot about what the video was, without compromising the clean features that made flash so desirable. Fast forward to HTML5 and you can see embedded videos are as simple as images were, and now there are markups that can be included solely to tell bots what they are accessing.
Captions and Subtitles
With the newly found power to implement captions or subtitles into video codes, robots are more entertained than ever. After all, they love content just as much as you do, and Matt Cutts, google search engine mouthpiece, has said time and time again that this is what the secret was. Web marketers can rejoice, and focus on creating videos now too. See that cinematography minor wasn’t a waste after all.
It’s about time that googles bots caught up and started learning in new ways. A simple fact of the matter is that just like your average school child, a robot needs to be able to learn in several different ways, boring documentaries are included. If you haven’t started managing your micro-data, now might be a good time to start. I’m thinking this is sure to be the industry standard at least as early as next year. I’m sure this is up for debate, so do so in the comments below.
Author:
Jared Whitehead is a Drupal enthusiast and thought leader, writing for Appnovation, an open source development solutions provider.
