In the “old days”, using JavaScript to enhance your site was not a recommended thing to do when going for search engine optimization. Javascript often times added a lot of code to the page that blocked many search engines from reading the content, produced rollover links that were not readable to a search engine spider, and weighed down the page giving the page a low content to code ratio.
Now days, with the recognition of the importance of search engine optimization, new ways of using JavaScript has been implemented to allow rollover links and other various effects to be readable by search engines. Not necessarily does JavaScript produce the code on the demand, the combination of using CSS and JavaScript together allows “dynamic” content to be produced, as well as “dynamic links”. Note that I quote them. The content and links in fact are not dynamic and hard coded into the HTML page, however using CSS and div tags, you can hide the div until it is ready to display. Using DOM and JavaScript, you can call on these div tags, manipulate the CSS to grab the content or links and display at your leisure.
This will allow the ability to still have the content and links visible to the search engine spiders, yet give your site more options as far as looking modern or cutting edge. There are a lot of good open source packages out there that do this. One of the most common is script.aculo.us. Script.aculo.us allows animated effects to your site, making it more cutting edge.
There are other ways of using JavaScript and other open source packages to achieve various effects to enhance your site. My portofolio site zencreatives.com uses a lot of open source JavaScript packages and CSS to produce various effects, yet making the page completely readable by a search engine.
Also a thing to note, all the JavaScript is kept in a seperate JS file. You do not want code on your page that is not necessary. This will wieght down your page, not to mention, to much JavaScript can keep a search engine spider from wanting to crawl the rest of your site.
Some time in the near future, I will put up working code samples and using open source packages to show you how it can be done. Not to mention I will show you how to tweak open source packages to achieve other effects that you may need. If you have any questions as to how to do something, feel free to leave a comment, and I will compile a list to make tutorials on. I will create them as I recieve requests or the ones that are most commonly needed. So stay tuned.
July 5th 2008
