Will HTML5 Tools help my Drupal site regarding SEO?

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
pinkonomy's picture

Hi,
I would like to ask if I use the HTML5 Tools module,will this help my site's SEO?
Furthermore,should I do any other configuration to the HTML5 Tools module?
Thanks

Comments

In Time?

Ryan258's picture

// Short Answer

Tags, metadata, and sculpting have all been staples of SEO since it began and there's a saying in SEO that if it can be searched, it can be optimized. Looking at HTML5 Tools it looks like you get the tools to work with the new tags to let crawlers understand your content better to tag your content appropriately to sculpt your page's content in an optimal fashion.

In SEO way back you could rank by stuffing your content and meta keywords with keywords because the number of ranking factors was really minimal. Few years ago it was thought to be somewhere in the 100s, now it's 300+.

The idea of using HTML5 as means to boost your SEO should be understood that it's probably not going to make an incredible different today, nor immediately. However, as search engines will inevitably continue to increase their number of ranking factors I think the healthiest way to look at it is that it will position your site's content to take new ranking factors in stride.

// Long Answer

I think the first call you would have to make is "Will HTML5 be a ranking factor?"

MY belief is yes since it adds the semantic element to your page content, identifying the primary content in less uncertain terms on a page for search engine crawlers.

If you're familiar with site architecture and link sculpting to properly pass page ranks, link juice, whatever. I would almost venture to say that HTML5's semantic offering does the same thing, but for page itself...

Site Architecture - Using links to sculpt the page rank of other pages on the site you want to rank more than others.

HTML5 Page Architecture - Using HTML5 semantic tags to sculpt the page content to register the main content of a page more than the surrounding content of block views, navigations, and all the other stuff surrounding the content.

When it comes to SEO, the ranking factors are always changing, there's over 300 of them now and learning things like "Add ALT tags with keywords to your images" is like one thing and adding ALT tags, while a decent idea for making content more accessible to those that rely on screen readers and search bots, doesn't inherently make the quality of the created content any better... just more indexible.

So given past trends there's certainly a case for HTML5 markup as something that helps indexation and crawling to provide an SEO benefit because machines can basically understand your content better.

SEOmoz hasn't really been a tremendous advocate of HTML5, if it were a drop dead, must do for SEO I think they would have expressed a greater enthusiasm for it. So to do HTML5 for the sake of SEO alone is just missing point (because there's so much more that it offers), but doing HTML5 I believe in the long term will position your site content correctly when you consider that in a few years time the number of ranking factors will probably double and there's no doubt as we've seen with meta-data in the past that HTML5 will provide a new scope for ranking factors.

// SEO Advice: A 10,000+ Hour View

Just a little SEO tip, don't just look at SEO as what it is today, but where it's going. There's so much content out there about all the little things, but search engines change and they really don't want people to know what those factors are. So if you don't want to spend a lifetime obsessing over junk like "which main menu item should I have first to get the most..." and basically sacrifice usability in the name of rankings I would recommend looking at SEO as ways to make your content clearer to search engines and users alike. HTML5 suites the former and in its own way provides you the freedom to do as you may to suit the latter.

User engagement on websites is now a ranking factor. Page views/visit, bounce rates, time on page, social shares... all of these are signals to search engines that the content has value. Search engines survive by caring about the results they provide their users and don't really care about you or your websites success. So the best thing you can do is do whatever you can to make your content a better result. Part of that is making sure the search engine has all it needs to make an informed judgement call about your content and HTML5 tags help that effort.

Drupal Developer | Saint Paul | Buenos Aires

HTML5 Tools and SEO

Alethe88's picture

pinkonomy: It's not just about the tools, it's about presenting a complete html5 face to the world. You might get yourself to appear really well in the SERPs only to disappoint many of your potential visitors because their browser rejects your tags. And as Ryan says, the only real tool in your toolkit is your content: Good content trumps everything else. With Google constantly tweaking Panda and Penguin and the "30% rule" and "ads above the fold" and "unnatural backlink patterns" and the never-ending "rel=nofollow" debate... I'd be paying a lot more attention to content creation than to coding and SEO gimmicks. Drupal out-of-the-box is already a leg up on most platforms but if you push it the wrong way, you can quickly bork even that...