We have been talking about Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies for sometime now. At one end Ajax becoming an asset from usability point of view but on the other hand it is making sites less search engine friendly. Search engines for now are not intelligent enough to make a server side request and retrieve the information to index. So it boils down to Usability Vs Search-ability? Which one to achieve?

What is the best way to achieve a balance between the two – making my site usable as well as search-able.

Here is one of the possible approach:

Step 1: To design your site without any Ajax. Javascript
Step 2: Then modify your website to include small Ajax, Java scripts components making sure that the content that gets hidden is available else where in the site which does not deploy Ajax

We are very familiar with the concept of separation of code from content. Yahoo recently tried to separate content itself into actual content and common content. What I mean is separating parts of a page that do not relate to the main content, such as navigation, menus repeated across the entire site, boilerplate text, or even advertising. Interesting!!!

Yahoo introduces a ‘robots-nocontent’ class which can be included with any HTML tag. By introducing this class within tag, the idea is to

• Focus on the main content
• Not to use those sections of the page marked for finding the page
• Improving abstract for the searched page by omitting unrelated info

How to use it?
<div class=”robots-nocontent”>Header of the site</div>
<span class=”robots-nocontent”>Navigation of the site</span>
<p class=”robots-nocontent”>Footer of the site </p>

My thoughts:
+ve
• Good way to segregate main/relevant content from general content
• More focus content

-ve
• Why “robots-nocontent”, why not “robot-content”?
• Is defining class a right approach? Most of the sites does not have well formed HTML, so think of a situation where you applied this class which covers the whole page content
• Currently keyword density as well as its location is one of the prime SEO techniques. What will happen if websites start using this tagging?
• Is it not raising concerns with content security? Someone can define not viewable content within these tags and search engine will happily ignore this and show your site even in top sites
• Need to be standardized before people start working towards it

What are your thoughts?