Introducing Web Components and What It Means for Search Engine Optimization and Privacy
How the latest Semantic Web technology is going to change the landscape of SEO and intellectual property
Web Components is a new type of HTML being written which allows the creation of visually rich widgets and templates without the use of C.S.S. and heavy JavaScript libraries like Swing and SpringJDBC. Not many people outside of the NYC JavaScript community know about this exciting new spec, so let’s dive in and explore by going over the five types of Web Components and why you should or should not use them.
Templates
If you’re serious about SEO then you probably use Wordpress for your blog. WordPress is a blogging platform that basically birthed the SEO industry back in 1998 right before the dot com bubble burst. 20 years later and it’s still the leader in holding content through it’s large diverse community (I actually know a woman who commits to the core codebase) and its use of widgets and templates aka “themes.”
Web Component templates are basically like Wordpress themes but written in HTML and JavaScript instead of PHP. This means you don’t need an Apache server to run your blog, which means all of your content is client-side and therefore more accessible to search engine bots. Obviously this means higher page rank.
Decorators
Decorators are C.S.S. properties. Search engines don’t look at C.S.S. so it would be counterproductive to focus on that programming language at this time.
Custom Elements
Ever wish you could use html like this:
<awesome>My Website</awesome>Well, you can’t. But if you like Java, you can soon extend existing elements into new ones you’ve created and then name them things like “awesome.” This will really bring the back-end development community to the forefront of front-end development. Unfortunately, using elements called <element> are not very good for SEO so I’d use this component sparingly.
Shadow DOM
The Shadow DOM is a slippery spooky slope to go down. It basically allows browsers to view the hidden children of parent elements on a web page. Now, although this means more semantics for Google and Bing to reach, it also means that it can be maliciously accessed by outside entities, causing a security issue. We’ve all come to that fork in the road as SEO evangelists where we have to choose between user privacy and page rank. I’m not going to make that decision for you, but just be aware that you may have to make it at some point.
Imports
An import is another Java-inspired Web Component, where you can simply import different components using HTML like you would import a Java library. This works well with Templates because you can import widgets instead of using PHP includes — which, again, means search engines can more efficiently scrape your content for better page rank
So that’s the Web Components spec in a nutshell. This is an exciting breakthrough for the SEO community, but it will involve work in getting to become familiar with the topic and to figure out how to use it in our favor. In a couple of weeks time, though, I hope to see see countless blogs and white papers being published from our community about this incredible new flavor of HTML!
Jenn Schiffer is an SEO evangelist, meta keyword developer, and organizer of #SEOconf #NewJersey.
