HTML5 Samples

Amazon’s recent announcement that it will support HTML 5 in their new eBook format – Kindle Format 8 (or KF8) – to be used by its Kindle Fire, highlights the growing trend of websites adopting HTML 5 as the accepted future web standard.

With this new following will come more opportunities for the pro-active SEO to take advantage of a number of features of this new format to gain the edge over the competition.

There’s been plenty of speculation in the online world about the opportunities inherent in the new HTML tags, so because of that, I won’t belabor that point.

But what I would like to do is highlight the very important search optimisation opportunities that can be gained from semantic HTML 5 tags…right now.

Link Architecture Optimisation with HTML 5

Google has already rolled out support of more semantic <a> rel attributes – part of HTML 5 – to their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

For example, Google’s support of rel=”next” & rel=”prev” was publicised in September (confirming behaviour already spotted in US SERPS while the testing for this feature was carried out), allowing different optimal SERP listings to be generated from the same website based on a searcher’s query with very fine grained control.

As another example, Google’s rel=”canonical” tags have been around for a while now, and can also be considered an extension of the semantic markup promoted by HTML 5.

Google’s interpretation of the tag is now becoming more complex, as the meta <link> tag concept of a ‘canonical page’ can also be indicated in a link rel attribute for an <a> tag.

Google is therefore inferring meaning from the implication of the tags that is more sophisticated than their original purpose of simply providing an alternative to a 301 redirect for webmasters who know they have a duplication issue.

This increased flexibility of interpretation is the area of optimisation that can immediately be taken advantage of.

Simply by combining these options, webmasters can now deliver re-purposed content targeting long tail terms that would otherwise struggle to perform with the minimum of supporting linkbuilding.

So just how does this work? Here is a practical example – we’ll look at a property website in order to spell out the process.

A Semantic SEO Example

The core content delivered in the day to day course of delivering an online property availability service is the individual property listing pages.

Before Google’s announcement of their more sophisticated handling of canonical tags, in order to build pages targeting long tail terms, unique content written around the terms would need to be produced for each of the terms – and when you’re targeting long tail, you’re targeting a lot of long tail terms to deliver sufficient traffic uplift.

So, lets say that 300 pages of 150 – 200 words of content is required to be researched and written.

This means that the CMS delivering the website would need to be adapted to deliver subsets of the main listing content that was relevant to the long tail terms, in order to combine and create a landing page that can both capture traffic and convert visitors with reasonable success.

Unfortunately, while a good strategy in principle, this approach is often shot down before it get started because of the resource-heavy content generation requirement and a feeling that the site quality is being ‘diluted’ (a common client concern with this approach).

After all, if one of 300 or so targeted search terms is ‘Commercial Property to Let in Walthamstow’ it’s unlikely that sufficient research will be undertaken to make it of use to searchers arriving on that term.

However, by setting the rel=”canonical” tag for pagination links to a ‘View all’ page, Google will return the ‘View All’ page for relevant top level search terms (‘Commercial Property London’, say) and treat the paginated pages as non-duplicate for searches highly related to their specific content.

Meaning our ‘Commercial Property to let in Walthamstow’ page can be targeted as a paginated page generated by a ‘Walthamstow’ search filter, say, without requiring any additional unique content.

This means we can use the content production resource for more valuable site optimisation: such as revamping and improving content on high value keyphrase landing pages, developing linkbait worthy content, delivering better quality information on all listed properties, etc, etc.

Oh, and we might pick out a few of the longer tail terms to get special treatment when we know we have the resources to back up the generation of some top quality content.

So, who says we need to wait for ‘the Future of HTML’? Why wait? We’ve just optimised our site for HTML 5.

Neat.