SEO and Programming Languages
Today, there are many people who still think that SEO isn’t important when creating a website. But they are mistaken. SEO must be taken into account from the very beginning, when the idea of creating a web page first arises.
If we take a look back, web pages used to be quite rudimentary, consisting of static pages built in basic HTML and CSS language. They’re nothing like the websites that we have today, which have seen a complete evolution.
HTML is the markup language with which we build the structure of a web page. Creating a clean and well-structured code will make the Google bot read it easily. But a website that only contains HTML, even HTML5, does not meet the expectations of today’s websites. For this, we need the help of other programming languages.
Adobe Flash
Although it’s disappearing, Adobe Flash was one of the languages that revolutionized web development in the 90s. With it we could create moving objects and special effects that gave the website a dynamic look.
However, although its use today is practically nil, using this language is one of the biggest mistakes we can make when creating a website, since the flash file will be embedded in the page.
Google bots are unable to read the content created with this language and therefore will not be able to index it in any way. This means that all the websites that were made with Flash in the past have a very big problem today.
Javascript
JavaScript is the language that, together with CSS, is the king of dynamic web development. With it we can create infinite kinds of effects on the web elements, moving images, etc.
But, not everything could be good news. Although Google has made significant progress in indexing content loaded by JavaScript, the reality is that most search engines still do not index this content.
The use of JavaScript both in the header and in the body of the web can affect positioning. Therefore, whenever JavaScript code is used, it must be outside the source code. That is, the code must be hosted in separate files that are called on when the web page is loaded.
Even so, if you decide to add JavaScript code within your website, it is advisable to use it at the end of the source code.
An example of using JavaScript is creating navigation menus with this language without “painting” the menu in HTML. In this way, we avoid these menus being a fundamental internal linking tool for SEO within the website.
The latter is a clear example of how abusing this language will negatively affect the positioning of your website.
AJAX
Ajax is a web technology with which we can load content on the page without reloading it. The pages loaded with Ajax are not indexable by the search engines because they do not have their own URL and therefore the navigation is lost.
How to Know if an Ajax Page is Accessible:
- The URL does not change when clicking on the link.
- The page has infinite scroll and when downloading and changing the content / page, the URL does not change.
- The URL change is not reflected in the browser bar
How to Detect If Website Is Using Ajax:
- Disable JavaScript and check if the site is still navigable.
- Try to access the pages by reloading or copying them and pasting them into a new tab.
- The URL must not contain a meta tag noindex, nofollow, nor be blocked by the robots.txt file.
So what we mean is that the browser is able to change URLs from JavaScript, without losing navigation or content.
Methods to Index Ajax:
- PushState: adds a page in the browsing history to later retrieve it.
- ReplaceState: replaces the current page.
- PopState: the user can move through the history.
If we go back in time to 2011, to make applications programmed with indexable AJAX the hashbang (#!) was used. The crawler found a URL like this: https://internetrepublica.com/#!seo.html; it sent a request to the server that returned the page, and Ajax controlled the content load (hashchange event).
In summary, both in the development of the website design, as well as with the tools which we use to create it, SEO is of vital importance from the very beginning.
Gemma Yelmo
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- SEO and Programming Languages - 9 January, 2018
