The SMX Munich is over and I am pleasantly surprised how both the contentual quality as well as the organization of the event managed to be even better than last year. Switching to a different Hotel was also a good move and this should have established the SMX as the Business-SEO-Conference of the year in Germany. Personally, I did both a WotR-Allstars panel as well as a question & answer session with Google's Johannes Müller and a session on HTML5 and the possible implications on SEO. I want to give a short summary of the last talk right now.

HTML5 is an update for HTML that opens up new fields of applications. Core features are a native support for video and audio, new graphical formats that do not need flash anymore and the possibility of developing offline-applications in HTML5. Right now, HTML5 is still considered a work-in-progress but many browsers already offer extensive support for this new standard. I read through many drafts, suggestions, evaluations and specifications for HTML5 and sorted them, so I could try to pick out the bits and pieces that are important for SEO.

New tags
HTML5 will see the first time where there is a somewhat useful, semantic method for describing different content-blocks on a website. For this, there are a number of new tags: <header>, <section>, <nav>, <aside>, <article> & <footer>. It is relatively safe to say that, in the future, searchengines will use these tags as clues to figure out what the content is. Known problem: they will not work without corresponding content within these new tags. Good content will likely become more important due to the improvement in semantic descriptions. It should also not come as a surprise that Google will not trust these descriptions. They might become a signal but there will still be the need for a consistent overall picture for the onpage-evaluation of a page to be positive.

New link-attributes
HTML5 defines a host of different attributes analogous to rel=”nofollow” for links that describe their content. A link can now point to the author of the article with the “author”-attribute, while “license” can show under which license the article is published. These new attributes will not increase the linkjuice for a page but they might help with being able to direct it throughout the existing links. We can assume that most CMS-providers will incorporate these attributes rather quickly. Seeing how, when optimizing a site, you often do not have to reach the optimal solution but (only) do better than the competition: do not be shy to use these new attributes, it is rather unlikely that they will do you any harm.

Improved video- & audio-integration
When integrating audio- and videofiles in HTML5, you do not need plugins/extensions like Flash anymore since HTML5 offers native handling for such files. <audio> and <video> will therefore become a native and integral part of HTML. If Google is able to understand videos on your domain as easily as they do pictures at the moment, then there is a chance of having quite a bit of fun with video-hosting on your own domain.

Microdata
Microdata/RFDa is a method of structuring data for searchengines that is already available as text on the page. Crawlers are able to easily collect and aggregate data such as event-informations, discussions, products as well as reviews. This advantage of structured data is also its greatest danger: in the future, searchengines will have these information ready in structured form. Why should Google send users along to a page that contains information which Google itself can just display right in the SERPs? Therefore: This subject matter is not a trivial one, while HTML5 is only a secondary aspect here. Those who are deciding on whether to feed Google structured data, should make sure not to make any mistakes.

What now? Implications for SEO: Don't panic!
Sure, for a company this size, Google is extremely fast. They will not rush integrating a HTML5-parser into their crawler and the overall impact of pure HTML5-signals will be rather small. HTML5 offers a number of features that makes it interesting from a technical SEO point-of-view. I believe though that the user will profit the most, which will indirectly also profit SEO: they will spend more time on the website, have shorter load-times and will be more satisfied with the webpage. Those of you who plan on setting up a new project in the near future might just keep HTML5 in mind if it makes sense to use it.