[StefanOnRails]

Hi everyone,

I've worked with Javascript & PHP for quite a while now, but I was never interested in SEO... well, until someone asked me to build their website. I am quite confident in my programming skills, but I have some concerns about whether or not the website I'm building will get high ranked or my lack of SEO knowledge will make me screw up the opportunity this person gave me. So here's my problem:

Let's say I have a quite simple website with only a section that is changed from page to page. In order to populate this section I use a GET variable "?page=name_of_page" and load the content via PHP. OK, now let's say I want to increase the speed of my content loading, by not refreshing the whole page, but rather by loading via Ajax a different content in that area when a certain link is clicked.

My question is: would this approach reduce my chances of scoring well in SEO even though I would add all the meta keywords on the same page (right now I'm dinamically generating meta tags relative to that ?page variable) ?
I would really appreciate an advice. Thanks

[Martyr2]

Well first of all meta keywords and such are not that influential these days. Google considers them when ranking, but not like before since it often abused by specifying a ton of keywords not related to content (known as keyword stuffing).

Using AJAX to load content will cut down the changes of exposing content for search engines to index because they don't see Javascript. You are better off making separate pages and having each page specific to a related topic than trying to fit all variations of content on a single page.

Now having said that, Google does its best to try and see pages with parameters as different pages. You can help this along using tools like Google's webmaster tools (simply add the domain to that tool).

While no one knows how search engines exactly rate sites (and they change the algorithm all the time) Google has flat out said that the best way to climb the ranks is to simply stay on topic, use image names that match the content around those images and using appropriate titles and headings all help Google see a page as authoritative.

[StefanOnRails]

Thanks for replying to my question. I guess I'll stick with my initial plan (to use a page which dinamically changes itself relative to that ?page parameter, I hope Google will be on my side this time , by the way, thanks for Google Webmaster Tools hint )