Posts Tagged ‘Ajax’

My 10 Main SEO Takeaways from SMX East 2009

October 19th, 2009 by Benj Arriola
Search Marketing Expo East

Search Marketing Expo East

In search marketing conferences, there are so much to information that it is impossible to listen to everything so everyone chooses their tracks/sessions wisely to listen to the golden nuggets of information which may not be the same golden nuggets of everyone else. Depending also on each individual’s knowledge dictates if a nugget is really golden of not. So that is why I start my title with a “My” since this is what I found to be valuable to me. Below are my top 10 takeaways from the 2009 Search Marketing Expo East in New York City. (more…)

SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content

November 17th, 2008 by Benj Arriola

Lightbox JS was popularized by Lokesh Dhakar where he made a nice friendly degradable JavaScript function where thumbnails can be linked to their larger images but load dynamically using JavaScript in a separate <div> box that loads in an animated manner. Many webmasters have adapted this and users like it too since there are no more page reloading and the need to hit the back button to go back to the thumbnail view. You can see demonstrations on the Lightbox JS website. After Lightbox JS came out, many other implementations of this technology emerged where the applications have been used not only for images, but for videos and also any content in general. The benefit of using this technique aside from the seamless fluid integration, they do not open as separate popup windows using a new web browser instance that is sometimes anti-popup blockers.

Generally, when would you use Lightbox JS?

When you need to display something briefly to the website visitor and you do not want them to leave the current page where the page has to reload again and to move back, you would have to press the back button. Often you see this in: (more…)

Track AJAX and Flash Actions with Google Analytics Event Tracking

May 21st, 2008 by Benj Arriola

Get more detailed actions with Google Analytics Event Tracking

Google Analytics/Google Code Event Tracking

Google Analytics Event Tracking PanelReleased as beta a version to testers, Google Analytics can now tag certain events that happen on a page that are normally not tracked by default on many other analytics platforms. This is common on websites that use AJAX and Flash, which are two technologies based on the current trends will just see more and more of these technologies used. Thus there is a great demand for tracking the events on sites like these.

Often web analytics platforms track many server and browser variables once an HTML rendered page loads. Problem today is many page elements powered by AJAX and Flash does not reload a new page. Thus an AJAX or Flash heavy site may be having a lot of user activity but are not effectively tracked as common web analytics software are not being able to track these events without a page loading.

Google Analytics new feature released to beta testers (more…)

4 SEO Solutions For Flash

February 15th, 2008 by Benj Arriola

4 Solutions to SEO problems of using Flash

Many of us has seen a website with Adobe® Flash®. It has attracted many website surfers every since Macromedia came out first with Shockwave® and then create a more lightweight version for the web, Flash. It’s main strength is the animation capabilities along with a strong scripting language that seems no one else on the market has matched . With the lack of competition and a superb product, it is supported by almost every browser and operating system with many third-party add-on tools made by several companies. It’s no surprise to see many sites using Flash these days.

But the problem is, Flash, just like images and videos, these are not made in a plain text language embedded within the HTML code using tags. A browser plug-in is used here that needs to be installed at least once in order for the web browsers to display Flash websites properly. With current day bandwidth standards this just takes a few minutes or even seconds.

Flash is in a binary file format, not in plain text which makes it more difficult to consistently or not possible at all for some search engines to extract the content found within a Flash file.

Do SEO professionals hate Flash?

Depends on who you are asking, I have heard many people in the SEO industry that just hate Flash period! Just because they claim these sites cannot be search engine optimized. The feeling can be mutual from some of the web design and development community that loves Flash and AJAX and just hates SEO (watch related funny videos).

Flash and AJAX are two technologies that enhance the user experience on a website and these technologies are going to stay here for a long time. Thus should be embraced by the SEO community and learn all the workarounds on (more…)

More Tips About Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the No Script Tag

December 14th, 2007 by Ray "Catfish" Comstock

Yesterday Benj wrote a great article about making AJAX SEO friendly. One of the recommendations he made was to “Solution 1: Serve Alternative Content” and he suggested that providing an alternative navigation to “actual pages on their own URLs that would load the same content as what would load in the AJAX links.” This SEO solution will work fine for some folks, but others may need a solution that allows the alternative content to exist on the same page as the AJAX application. That solution is the no script tag. (more…)

Making AJAX SEO Friendly

December 12th, 2007 by Benj Arriola

On many blogs, SEO professionals say AJAX is evil in SEO, just in the same way Flash is. But ask a Web2.0 designer/developer, AJAX is so cool that people will love it and stay on your site seeing the quick interactive visual feedback without any page reloading. Let’s look deeper into the possibility of making SEO and AJAX BFF.

What is AJAX?

AJAX is a term coined publicly by Jesse James Garrett of AdaptivePath meaning: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. As posted on Wikipedia:

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The main intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.

AJAX is asynchronous in that extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers. There is, however, no requirement that the asynchronous content be formatted in XML.

AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Keeping the technical language to a minimum, the main observable benefit you have in running AJAX is having dynamic content load on your page without having the whole page to reload on a new URL. This gives you the benefit to only reload certain parts of a page making the resources load to a minimum aside from having it visually appealing to the user.

Problem 1: SEO Issues with Dynamic Content of AJAX

Search engines crawl websites using bots that are also called crawlers or spiders. These are nothing but programs that visit webpages on the Internet looking at all links and further visiting every valid link found crawlable. And content on the page is read and associated to the URL crawled. (more…)