Your friendly neighbourhood doctors are often contacted by journalists and analysts who have questions about HTML5, usually from a consumer of business perspective. This is great, as we spend many more hours every week mutely shaking our heads while reading the ill-informed columns from journalists or analysts who haven’t contacted us.

Through our handy Ask The Doctor service, we get a lot of e-mails asking us about HTML5’s effect on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While we can’t answer in great detail (Messrs Google, Yahoo, Bing, and their friends haven’t sent us in-depth details of their algorithms), we’ve rounded up some useful facts from Google, the world’s most dominant search engine.