AJAX & SEO

Emerging technologies tend to have an uncomfortable association with accessible techniques. The understandable explanation is that the existing techniques are fashioned on the basis of existing technologies. AJAX and SEO share a similar relationship.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) brings together various technologies to create a technique that make web pages more like web applications. The key benefit of AJAX is that the page has a greater sense of interactivity, and the user requests are rendered in smaller portions. In other words, AJAX enables the creation of a scenario that is both data-centric and user-centric. Developers were unconvinced towards the use of AJAX, but with the introduction of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this changed drastically. GWT made AJAX easier for developers to create applications in, and needless to the say the end user stands to benefit the most from this.

There was prevalent anxiety about AJAX, and its invisibility to search engines. What was phenomenon with AJAX was suggestive of the destiny that Flash had faced before this. JavaScript, which is what AJAX applications use, is not visible to search engine spiders. In other words, when a search engine spider is crawling a website that is created using AJAX, most of the content would not be visible. The reason for this is that since smaller portions of content are rendered with AJAX, there are no unique URL’s that a search engine can direct searchers too. In other words, the whole purpose of enhancing interactivity would fail.

The resolution is to be aware of the problems that SEO for an AJAX application would pose, and to defy the same during the construction phase. For instance, Keyword specific inbound links that point towards a specific section, not just the homepage of the website, would be beneficial.

AJAX saves time that is otherwise spent on refreshing or reloading a page. SEO makes sure that all the hard work that is put in by writers, designers, and developers pays off and the target audience is able to reach the website – their desired destination. The significance of both AJAX and SEO cannot be undermined. And their importance is such that no website owner would want to compromise to make use of one and forgo the other. The co-existence of AJAX and SEO does not seem like a distant dream at the moment. If new technology creates roadblocks for existing techniques, it also often makes way for newer techniques to flourish.