Now that the dust has settled a bit around the issue of Apple not supporting Flash in its mobile products, the SEO community is starting to take a closer look at the benefits of using HTML5 as the delivery method for video. In the last 4 to 6 weeks, I’ve seen a surge in interest for HTML5 video, and not because it’s the only way to play video in an iPad. There seems to be a belief out there that HTML5 is a better way to expose video to search engines – specifically product videos in the case of retailers.

Perhaps the urge to investigate HTML5 comes from the realization that Flash is not the most SEO friendly delivery mechanism for video. We’ve all heard Google can in some cases recognize video wrapped in Flash, but there’s never been any evidence of that being the case. Not to mention that in 99% of the cases on e-commerce sites, Flash video is itself wrapped around a popular JavaScript library called SWFObject for a better user experience and graceful degradation. Not terribly SEO-friendly.

On the other hand HTML5 video tag appears to be built for video SEO, just like the regular HTML image tag is the canonical way to expose images to both users and search engines. Consider the simplicity of this HTML5 video tag:

<video src=”/myvideofolder/videofile.mp4″ controls=”controls”></video>

In which the video source file is directly exposed and easily findable like crawlers, just like images:

<img src=”/myimagefolder/imagefile.jpg”/>

If Google Images offers any indication of how HTML5 video could be indexed in the future, then it is expected that the video source URL itself will play an important role. Video files with URLs like “/running-shoes/new-balance.mp4″ will do better than others like “/myvideos/877732.mp4″. But that’s only one of the dozens of new tricks I expect will emerge in the next 18-months – in what could constitute a small revolution int he SEO world.