SEO and Ajax

Its web 2.0 and the world simply cannot stop raving about how Ajax has revolutionized the internet. Well, for people who do not know Ajax is a new method to bring tremendous user friendliness to the internet.

It uses existing technologies and combines them to produce some extremely powerful applications. Yes, the user will be thrilled and more than happy with your Ajax website. But where does that place the webmaster?

Ajax is also one of the most un-search engine friendly technologies. That means that if you have Ajax applications on your website, then it is time to rethink your SEO techniques.

The biggest difficulty with Ajax is that it gives you very little options to manipulate the TITLE tags and page headers.

Accessibility has always been a problem with Ajax and what good is technology when users cannot find it?

A workaround

A lot of SEO experts have suggested that creating a second set of static views to be fed to the search engines might be a good option.

In simpler terms, you create a second website without the technology to make it accessible by search engines. The URL must delver the same content to both the users as well as the search engines. But this is not very creative nor is it very practical. Think about the amount of time and effort that goes into it. We also need specific inbound links that point to relevant sections within the virtual directory.

Different solutions

The above mentioned two are not the only workarounds that have been proposed. A few people also suggest that using the ‘noscrpit’ tag is a good way to deliver some static information to the search engines. This means, you create duplicate sections of the same page, one for Ajax and the other for the search engine. But once again, is this feasible? Only time will tell, if Ajax and seo can ever go hand in hand.