AJAX and SEO

AJAX offers a huge leap in functionality for an online store. By dynamically inserting information into the page without the need to click, AJAX can make the shipping and checkout process a lot smoother from the customer perspective. This smoother transaction process can improve your store’s conversion rate and reduce load on your support line. AJAX is also great at rendering store data on the back end too (as 3dCart’s shopping cart solution proves). As with all new web technologies, a merchant must factor in any impact the technology will have on SEO (search engine optimization). Why? Any gains in an increased conversion rate can quickly be negated by loosing ranking in SERPs (search engine result pages).

Ajax renders information real time using Javascript. Search engine spiders disregard the Javascript. This could be an SEO problem if you are using AJAX to render content that you’d like search engine spiders to crawl and index. The content be over looked and as content is king on the Internet, your SEO efforts could be adversely impacted. So, what can you do? If you’re using AJAX to display more than shipping and checkout information, you may want to have a dumbed-down or degradable method to access the content so it can be indexed.