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We’ve been doing a lot more consumer facing Ajax development work of late.  There a bunch of interesting challenges and risks, and since so many of of us live and die by our Google juice I thought I’d pass this bit of information along.

How to: Get Google and AJAX to Play Nice by Rich McIver

Here are some of the key points, which he explains in much more detail.

1. Design your site with degradable AJAX, that way users with JavaScript disabled can view a working version of your website along with JavaScript enabled visitors.
2. After you’ve established a non-AJAX working version of your website, go back and include an alternative AJAX enhancements where you desire.
3. When designing, make sure to check your website with JavaScript disabled as well as through the eyes of a text only browser such as Lynx or SEO-Browser.
4. Perform a browser check to make sure the user has JavaScript enabled, that way you’re only serving AJAX pages to users that can view them.

Rich’s article gets you off to a great start for building Google “friendly” sites. In our upcoming book Enterprise Ajax we show two very important techniques (with code samples) they are how to fix the back button and bookmarking (or deep linking).  These techniques will help you keep your site interactive and top of the heap in Google.

Technorati Tags: seo, google, pagerank, ajax, dhtml

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