What is Silverlight?
Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework that provides functionalities similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Initially released as a video streaming plugin, later versions brought additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools. The current version, 3.0, was released on July 9, 2009.[1]
Why Silverlight?
Flash and AJAX do almost the same things as Silverlight does. But Silverlight applications are created with our favorite language C#. You can use any other language which is compatible with the .NET Framework, too. With the power of XAML you can create great design scenarios.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. This means that doing SEO to your site will make it more indexable and more people will visit it. Here are a few of the rules which you should stand by in order to do the best SEO:
- the <title> tag should contain the most important information about your site
- the most significant content should stay in the beginning of the page (after the <body> tag)
- all image tags (<img />) should define the alt tag – this is the only way for the search engine to understand what an image ‘says’
Do I need to do SEO to my Silverlight applications?
This is a question with no explicit answer. If your website is one Silverlight application and you need search engines to index it, you definitely need to think of a way how to do SEO. I strongly suggest not to create the whole website using Silverlight. I prefer using it only for animations and displaying data in an unusual way (charts, graphics, etc). If you need a special Silverlight application that performs something, you won’t need to do SEO in most of the cases. Do not forget that Silverlight is running in the browser, so everything is going on locally.
What is the problem with RIAs and SEO?
Rich Internet Applications are great thing, but they work dynamically. What does it mean? It means that when you load the page, you do not see static text but an application (except AJAX, which works with HTML). You can work with application the same way you work with a desktop one. But no matter what you do, when you reload the page the initial text will be shown. The idea is that you are working offline. Everything you do goes locally, on your computer only.
An Internet user can see these applications, but the search engine won’t see them, because they cannot read them. So this is the main problem when using RIAs in your site: how to show the search robot what is inside your Silverlight application. In this article I will show you a few solutions of this problem. None of them is perfect but you can see how you can “open the eyes” of the search robot.
Conclusion
In my opinion there is no best way when it comes to RIAs and SEO. If you want SEO – just use static content. Do NOT put significant data in your Silverlight applications. Use it mainly for animations and data visualization and leave everything else as a static text surrounded by HTML tags. Moreover, search engines do not only look at the text, but they get the HTML tags and relations between them.
Article from silverlightshow.net