To upgrade or not?, to HTML5 or not?

[hugoaf]

Currently ranking 1st (local: with the city name at the end of kw) for the main target keyword. But in need to upgrade Joomla CMS for security reasons and Design to improve conversions. What would you recommend:

a) do not touch the (generated) code structure, I mean to replicate current structure in the new template.

b) go for a new HTML5 pattern but keep content without any change.

c) your recommentation...

Thanks!

[jonmifsud]

It would depend on what you refer when you say to go for a new HTML5 pattern.

If you want to replace some div elements with section you can go ahead it should not make as much impact. As long as your HTML is valid and makes sense it should be good. Make sure that when you upgrade to HTML5 you still support the current browsers. IE8 and lower require some rules in order to render HTML5 properly.

I would suggest if you are doing this switch to also use things like Microdata - which on the otherhand can really improve visibility on search engines.

[hugoaf]

Thanks Jonathan, I want to go for HTML5 but I still have many doubts, because of the lack of information about how HTML5 can impact SEO.

Is there some one who wants to share experiences on switching to HTML5?

is it too early?, should we wait until we have more data?

[reynoldsdesign]

I've built a few sites with HTML5 and haven't noticed any issues in the search engines. Be sure to use modernizr.js If you are going to support IE. There may be apache configurations as well but modernizr works well.

[AgentsofValue]

There's nothing wrong with upgrading your site.  In general, I would recommend to update your site, if you have the time to do it right.  Things to watch out for are:

• will every page still have a unique URL?  There are a number of HTML5 based systems which run the entire site on a single URL (look at how Gmail runs for example).  It can be great for an end user experience since the pages appear to load very quickly.  However, such a system would probably make it difficult for all of your pages to be properly indexed.

• assuming you'll have unique URLs - make sure that the new site will use the same URLs as the original site.  If not, plan to put in 301 redirects for all of the existing pages.

• just because you're going HTML5, don't forget the basics.  Use your title tag, H1, H2, etc on the new template.

• after you launch the new site, make sure spiders can still crawl the site properly.  If yes, then you should be all set with your new site.