HTML5 introduces elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern websites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block for example
<nav> (website navigation block),
<footer> (usually referring to bottom of web page or to last lines of HTML code)
<audio>
<video>
<object>.
Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as <font> and <center> whose effects have long been superseded by the much more powerful Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior.
The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite the similarity of its markup. It has, however, been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. It comes with a new introductory line that looks like an SGML document type declaration, , which triggers the standards-compliant rendering mode.As of 5 January 2009, HTML5 also includes Web Forms 2.0, a previously separate WHATWG specification
Although we don’t know, and probably will never know, how Google ranks pages, we do know that two of the most important factors are relevancy of content and quality backlinks.
and I would venture to guess that the semantic elements will never have an effect on page rankings.Using HTML5 semantic elements in your pages today will not give your content higher search engine rankings. In fact, it’s almost ridiculous to think this would be the case.
Some great features of HTML 5 include the easily indexable tags that it will include. First and foremost HTML 5 will improve page segmentation. The way that it will do this is “footer”, “header”, and even “nav” tags. This will prove to be very helpful for SEO. One interesting tag in particular is the “article” tag. An article tag will prove to be effective for identifying key content which may hold backlinks to various sites, and can be very important for link building services. Improving the page segmentation will help Google and other search engines, easily index your site when complex functions are running.
HTML 5 will prove to very important for SEO. Not only will things like video and audio be much simpler to use with tags, but page segmentation will make your site a much more indexable webpage. This is key for SEO, and certainly will play a big part in web development in the upcoming years. It is important to understand that not all things have been solved by HTML. If you want a highly interactive site that runs smooth, you still might want to use some Flash plug ins. The most important thing to do is stay on top of HTML 5, you do not want to be playing catch up a year from now, losing out on money, and potential customers.
Even if there were eventually some small benefit added to Google’s ranking algorithm for the semantic tags, the difference would be so small that it probably wouldn’t matter. And that should never change. Trivial use of semantic tags should never affect SEO rankings, and they certainly don’t do so as of this writing.
View the result on HTML 5 Validator
View on Rich Snippet Google Structured Data Testing Tool
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