Using AJAX technology to improve search engine rankings

Describing navigation elements embedded in your Web pages can lower your search engine rating and lower your site's responsiveness. The author of this article would like to explore with you how to use AJAX technology to solve these two problems.

Many well-designed Web sites contain a large amount of navigable information associated with the actual content. HTML tags for navigation can affect your search engine evaluation, and can improve the visitor's page download experience. In this article, you'll see how to use Ajax to create a more centralized, faster-loaded Web page.

I. Separation of navigation and content

Let's use an example as a starting point. Please consider the article you are reading, which has the following elements:

· A header that has some predefined links to various parts of the informit.

· There is a line under the header that puts this article into the INFORMIT directory structure (in fact, this is the only navigable element associated with the directory).

· A sidebar in right-hand side, with links to popular articles and recommended content.

· A footer, and some links that will never change.

The above "blending" is likely to affect the way the search engine indexes your data:

· Because search engines can't differentiate between content and navigation text, they will index everything they find on your page. Since the keywords in the directory are mixed with irrelevant navigable keywords, the association between the contents is greatly reduced. Some search engines claim that they can find duplicate text in the pages they are searching for (for example, fixed headers and footers) and delete them. However, do not rely on this possibility, even if they achieve this technology, it may not always be reliable.

· Outbound links in Web pages affect the page evaluation of your content. Although this may improve the ranking of popular articles (because many pages are linked to them), all the pages that are linked to (for example, privacy policies) usually get the highest page rating-this may not be a concern you have been concerned about. In one of my Web sites, the highest rating page is a form for sending messages to a Web administrator-not what you want users to find on Google first.

Attention

Even if you don't use a site map, you can get a look at the page rank of your page through Google's site map user interface.

Navigable elements that are added to a Web page can also affect users who use low speed Internet access, especially if the Web page does not use a DIV element (Informit) to use the table. In this case, the entire table must be loaded into some Web browsers before it is displayed to the user.

Traditionally, web designers typically use a frameset or create a complete set of navigation architectures (widely used JavaScript code) to separate navigation from content. Both of these approaches have their drawbacks, so it is not surprising that many large Web sites avoid using the frameset.

With the technology used in the AJAX framework, you can provide a solution for this problem:

· Each Web page contains only the navigable elements and placeholders for the actual content.

· Loads these navigable elements after the Web page is loaded through an embedded frame (IFRAME) or with a XMLHttpRequest object.

· The contents of the navigable elements are then merged into the content of the Web page to produce a clean page that does not embed any frames.

Before you redesign your Web page in this way, you need to consider the following questions:

· The search engine will only see the initial Web page. You must make sure that the page contains links to related pages or to a site map. The navigation line at the top of the article header in the Informit Web site and the links in the article Information section of the page are just a good way to achieve this.

· Visitors who prohibit the invocation of JavaScript in their browsers will have the same page view as the search engine. You have to make sure that their restricted view does not make a big impact on your site's functionality.

· You may want to keep some static content on your page. For example, the informit identification and copyright information must always be displayed to all visitors.

You can start the next step when you are sure that you want to attach your navigation structure to the page and which parts should be separated from it.