I've built a full ajax site using jQuery and asp.net. All database data are loaded dynamically via client-side ajax calls. There are no html forms or postbacks, just ajax calls to a web service returning (xml) data.
Now, I need to make the site SEO friendly with emphasis to google. What is the least time expensive way to do it? Is there a way jQuery or asp.net can help me with out-of-the-box solutions/components etc? On the other hand, there is the google specification but is it standard or easy to implement in my case?
Any help or ideas much appreciated.
your question is kinda unspecific.
jquery is javascript - based on how it's implemented can be very bad for SEO
asp.net is server side - can be anything, what counts is the HTML you have on page.
for a start i would recommend googling your site, then click on the "cached" link below it, then "text only version" ... this is what google sees. if you can makes sense of it, then google can make sense of it. if there is nothing there (possible for a very very ajaxy site) then well you are in trouble. then go to your competitiors site and do the same. if he is doing a better job look at his HTML sourcecode and think about ways you can get in this direction.
you would maybe also like to take a look at http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html
Related
I am building my own GridView in an ASP.NET project
I am drawing out my plans and I was wondering what the best solution is to a simple problem, paging and sorting.
The fast and easy way is using submit buttons (or similar) and POSTING the form back. That's also how the ASP.NET gridview works.
pro:
less overhead
con:
backbuttons
The second method is using links and the URL with GET requests.
pro:
backbuttons work just fine
direct link to certain position
con:
less reusable because of the dependence on url
The third method is AJAX
pro:
little overhead
con:
harder to implement
What design/solution would you pick and why?
Am i overlooking some pros and cons?
I add some extra comments to think about.
-The second method is using links and the URL with GET requests.
This is the one that you need to use, if your need web spiders (google) knows all the pages of your site, and be SEO friendly. This method have the problem that you can not have viewstate and each time you must render the page that you see on the url parameters with out knowing anything else.
With this case you probably have more problems if you wish to make edit on one line
-The fast and easy way is using submit buttons (or similar) and POSTING the form back
This is the method if you won to have many functionality on code behind because with the post back you have all the previous action that you have done, and the viewstate is working and can be used for that. Is not SEO friendly and if you like to make it you need extra code to write on the url just the page that you are now and need to land.
-The third method is AJAX
This is the method that must co-exist with the previous and not alone for the case that the browser fails to run javascript for any reason. If you do not care about that, the rest is that this method is also not SEO friendly and you need to make it, is cool, modern, and is a must for modern site, but if you going to make difficult things then you may end up with many issues that must be solved.
To summarize:
More than show data ? Post Request : Get Request ; // ToDo: make it ajax
Assuming I'm stuck with asp.net web forms (I'd love to use MVC partial views), are there any good alternatives to asp.net AJAX 4.0 client-side templates?
In other words, is there some way to specify some html, with placeholders for data properties, to which I could then bind a JSON result. Are there any good jQuery plugins to do this?
I ask because based on the results I'm seeing from Google, this library doesn't seem to be widely used—most search results are from 2008-2010. This question seems to confirm that suspicion.
EDIT
I despise answering my own question, but this link (jQuery Templates) seems to me to be the best bet. If anyone else has any input, please post.
Definitely consider jQuery Templates. We use them quite extensively in WebForms with ScriptServices as a data provider. There is a very small learning curve.
Also check out KnockoutJS, which integrates seamlessly.
Adam, coincidentally, I am using JQuery to retrieve some server side data calling Web Services via Ajax and binding the result on the client side. On my particular case, I am only showing data in a tabular manner, so I am using the jquery datatables plugin (which is fantastic, in my opinion; the API is well documented and easy to extend if you need to).
If you need to show data differently, I think you'll need to write quite a good amount of boilerplate javascript code.
EDIT: I just saw your link reagarding Jquery Templates and looks really cool. I didn't know it existed :) Thanks!
i'm not sure how to call that. i'm looking for some samples guiding me how to implement a automatic page extend. i'm mean something like the friends list on facebook. first only a few friends are loaded. after you scroll down, some others get loaded.
thx in advance
The solution to your problem relies more on AJAX then anything else.
I suggest using jQuery Ajax, and here is a nice article that will get you started with calling ASP.NET web services via client side script.
enter link description here
If you don't have experience using ajax this will probably be a lot for you to grasp. Especially if you're going to dive in with a feature like you described above.
Edit: It may be more practical to use a plugin to achieve this:
scrolling jQuery plugin
Not sure if this belongs in community wiki...
Can somebody give some general guidelines on how to successfully build an ASP.NET site that isn't dependent on JavaScript? My understanding is that I should build a functional site initially without JavaScript, and use it to enhance the user experience. That is easier said than done... how can I make sure my site works without JavaScript short of disabling JavaScript and trying it? Or is this something that comes with experience?
Try ASP.NET MVC! sure most of the examples use JavaScript for the AJAX functionality, but it's easy to build a fully functioning site that doesn't use JavaScript.
Since ASP.NET MVC doesn't use server controls with all their embedded JavaScript, it's a great way to build a site with very minimal and lightweight HTML, while still writting your data access and business logic in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language.
I've built working ASP.Net sites with little or no JavaScript, so it's definitely possible (just a royal pain.) The trick, and this sounds silly, is to use as few <ASP:> type tags as possible. Those all spawn various levels of JavaScript. Regular old-school HTML elements work just fine with no scripting.
So, on the extreme end, you write, say, your form using all plain-vanilla HTML elements, and then you have that form submit point at another page that accepts the form submit and hands it off to your server-side scripting.
To put it another way, pretend that all you get with ASP.NET is a snazzy server-side programming language and you're writing HTML in 1998.
Now, having done this, I can tell you that what this ends up as is a classic ASP webpage with cleaner programming syntax. ;) Most of the features that make ASP.NET "better" than classic ASP hang on JavaScript, so writing a JavaScript-free ASP.NET system is an exercise in shooting oneself in the foot repeatedly.
However, the one thing you should absolutely do is make sure the first page or two do work without JavaScript. Unlike 10 years ago you can safely assume that any browser hitting your page has JavaScript, and unlike about 8 years ago, your visitors probably don't have JavaScript turned off for speed reasons, but they very well might have something like the NoScript plugin for Firefox dialed all the way to 11. So, your first couple of pages need to work well enough to a) tell the new visitor that they need JavaScript, and b) still look and work good enough to make it look like adding your site to the white list is worth it. (In my experience, most people get the first one done, but in such as way as to totally drop the ball on the second. To put it another way - if your super fancy web 2.0 mega site starts looking like craigslist if noScript is fired up, I'm probably not going to bother letting you run scripts on my machine.)
If you want to use many of the ASP.NET controls (i.e. the DataGridView), ASP.NET pages are generated with lots of JavaScript in order to handle the events on the controls (i.e. selecting a row in the DataGridView). I think you're going to lose so much of ASP.NET that trying to have ASP.NET work without JavaScript enabled is impractical.
Disabling Javascript is the best way to test how a web site performs with out it. Good news, IE8's developer tools provide a quick and easy way to do just that. Now, having said that, often times the only thing that you can do is put up a message with a noscript tag to the effect that your site requires javascript for best function.
Many ASP.NET functionalities & controls won't work when JavaScript has been disabled. Think of LinkButton's onclick event which contains a call to a JavaScript function.
LinkButton is just an example. But there are many other things too.
If your concern is with JavaScript being disabled in user's browser then you can check for that and handle your site accordingly.
If you do decide to build the site without JavaScript then you will end up building a somewhat static web site. If your need is just to build a static website then you can go on with this approach.
Write everything with basic html forms and css, and then you will know that it works without javascript.
Once you are happy with it, then look at unobtrusive javascript, so you can modify the way the application works when javascript is enabled.
Last time I looked at some stats about this around 1% disable JavaScript, so why spend hours and hours on this when what you should do is show a message telling the user that your site requires javascript.
Use your time to be productive instead of trying to write around perceived limitations.
There are implementations for history.back in Micrososft AJAX and jQuery (http://www.asual.com/jquery/address/).
I already have jQuery and asp.net ajax included in my project but I am not sure which implementation of history.back is better.
Better for me is:
Already used by some large projects
Wide browser support
Easy to implement
Little footprint
Does anybody know which one is better?
EDIT:
Another jquery plugin is http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history It is recommmended in the book JQuery Cookbook. This one worked well so far.
One alternative to jQuery Address is the nice jQuery history plugin. There are also URL Utils.
Reference: AJAX History and Bookmarks.
If you are building an ASP.NET application then using ASP.NET Ajax Framework gives you many advantages and a nice-simple API to use server-side.
Below you can find an example that uses Browser History with ASP.NET Ajax
Create a Facebook-like AJAX image gallery
Both have a wide range support in browsers.
For me is easier to integrate Microsoft AJAX Framework in an ASP.NET page so again if you have an .aspx page it might be easier to work with ASP.NET AJAX
If you don't need exactly AJAX, i.e. updating only parts of the site on request is sufficient for you, then you can use invisible iframe as target for loading generated HTML file containing only JS script that updates/resets "updateable" parts of the site. This is cross-browser solution and doesn't need address polling.
Example, but not in ASP: kociszkowo.pl (Polish site)
When you click there in the section icon and your browser supports javascript, link is modified before being fetched - target is changed to iframe and href is suffixed with .dhtml to inform server, that we're interested in a special version of the page. If you press Back in your js-equipped browser, then previously fetched iframe page is loaded from the cache. Simple, but requires some decisions at architectural level.
This link modification is irrelevant here, it's just the result of combining JS/non-JS world.
In my experience, your best bet is using the same one that you have doing most (if not all) of your ajax calls. For instance, if you're using asp:UpdatePanel's, use the MS one - if you're using jQuery.ajax, use the jQuery history plugin. If you're doing a mix (which I've tried to avoid in my projects), I'd personally test with both and see which behaves better - if they both test fine, then it's a bit of preference. Some may argue the Microsoft one would have better support, but jQuery's history plugin may get more use and more mature.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.updatepanel.aspx
http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.ajax#options