The widespread adoption of HTML5 will bring search optimisation benefits to owners of all sites according to PR, social media and SEO agency Punch Communications.

Web standards are constantly evolving and HTML5 will be latest release of Hyper Text Mark–up Language when it is formally recommended by W3C in 2012. The new standard brings several new important elements that reflect the way in which the modern web has evolved and should bring benefits for SEO.

The team responsible for developing the standard have worked hard to include new semantic replacements for common elements. The new elements are much more descriptive and use terms such as <article>, <nav> and <footer> to replace the more generic terms of <div> or <span>. These new terms should make it easier for developers to tag relevant content and for search engines to index pages more effectively, especially on sites that contain multiple content blocks such as Blogs or News sites.

James Ryder, Account Director at Punch Communications, commented:

“The web is constantly evolving and it still remains to be seen how developers will use the new components of HTML5. More interestingly, Google has indicated that they are waiting to see how developers use the new elements before deciding upon the relevancy of certain elements as ranking factors. It could be that Google is looking to us for the answers or simply that the web is a changing environment and that no one can accurately predict how standards will be adopted.

“It’s the case that developers are already experimenting with the new <video> element and extensions to DOM scripting in HTML already. As HTML5 becomes widely adopted by browsers we’ll start to see entire sites using the standard and reaping the SEO benefits of semantically describing content”.

Punch Communications has developed a strong presence in global search engines due to a focus on online PR activity allied with strong onsite SEO. That, combined with significant social media experience and a core traditional PR team, represents the business’ overall integrated proposition to each client.

For more information, or to enquire regarding PR jobs at Punch, please visit www.punchcomms.com or call +44 1858 411600.