An Argument of Semantics
We are honored today to have a guest blogger on our StratumTech blog from our development team. Jean (Goodwyn) leads, guides and manages our various web and interactive development teams and the skills they bring forth in our work at Stratum. Thanks Jean for the insight.
Changes in HTML 5 Bound to Affect SEO
Having spent a number of years in my career as a front-end web developer, I still get excited about major shifts in building the web. Though there are still many who get websites designed today that don’t reap the benefits of well-executed semantic markup, the shift from table-based HTML layouts to CSS-driven layouts was like catapulting from the stone age straight into the age of the microchip. Suddenly, rather than being an oversimplified markup language to be fought with, tricked, and worked around, front-end code was a lean, mean, content delivery machine able to satisfy many customers at once - such search engine spiders for SEO, visually impaired visitors for section 508 compliance, and more.
HTML 5 promises to take these advantages to the next level, in numerous ways - and many of those ways are a boon to the masses only in indirect ways. Indirect, because they will make it easier for those who build the web to more easily create even cleaner code - which will make for a better browsing experience and possibly lower costs for web development. A few features of HTML threaten larger ramifications, however - and in this particular conversation, I’m only going to address one: a new container called ‘nav’.
For those who don’t build the web, here’s a brief look at the current landscape for developers: when building the web, every element (like the heading of the page, or navigation) is usually placed in a container. There are only a very few types of containers, and so we give these containers classes and IDs to denote how they should behave. This means that in my builds, the ID of a page header is usually ‘header’. This isn’t a requirement however; I could call it ‘monkeybeard’ if I wanted to, and a browser could understand it just the same. As such, content indexing services (like the Google search spider) have no means to give added importance to my header, because they can not identify which part of the page is a header with any certainty. Sure, my header might have the ID ‘header’ - but the next person’s might be ‘page-title’, and this makes equal sense.
Likewise, the container for the navigation cannot be identified with certainty - and so content indexing services have no simple way to determine which of the links on my website are core navigation and which are related strictly to the page content. The ‘nav’ container offers the way to change this.
Using the ‘nav’ container, developers will be able to uniformly identify which parts of the website is official navigation - the links that take the user through every page on the website, usually organized hierarchically. That’s good for developers - especially the ones who have to ‘read’ the code after it’s been created. The big shift I see on the horizon, however, is the SEO benefit.
Right now, the Google spider is constantly crawling the web - and while we have the cute name ‘the spider’ for it, the truth is that it’s multiple, beefy machines voraciously devouring web page after website. If you’ve ever waited for a new website to show up in Google, you know that despite the number of machines doing this work, it can still take days and even weeks for a site to appear. It can take much longer for Google to truly begin to ‘understand’ a page or site.
Imagine what Google will be able to accomplish once it doesn’t have to do the work to ‘understand’ which of your links help it index your site and which don’t? Half the spider’s work in digesting the site might vanish right there, just in being told ‘this link is navigation’ in a way it can understand. Additionally, the words used to display navigation to the user might take a higher priority when it comes to SEO - essentially making ‘About Our Company’ wasted words, while ‘About StratumTech’ becomes gold. Further still, it might help indexing services like the Google spider understand that any link NOT labeled ‘nav’ is describing a relationship to content - offering the opportunity for very light lifting for a spider to understand which links are related to cataloging the content of the internet and which are about understanding the relationships on the web. It may seem like a small thing - but the potential impact on the way websites perform in search engines (just as one example) and the work that copy writers, information architects, search engine optimization specialists, and web developers will do to achieve performance is on par with a tectonic shift.
I’ll be watching the W3C as they roll out specifications for HTML 5, as I’m sure many developers will - but I’ll be watching the search pundits too. No doubt every major search architect is already dissecting both the forthcoming language changes and their own algorhythms, planning the next major shift in search as we know it.
Jean Goodwyn