<story><title>What every Web Developer should know about SEO</title><url>https://www.polemicdigital.com/2015/01/every-web-developer-know-seo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mootothemax</author><text>For JavaScript-heavy sites, I still recommend following Google&amp;#x27;s AJAX-crawling guidelines, and supporting the pre-rendered view request variable _escaped_fragment_&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;webmasters&amp;#x2F;ajax-crawling&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can do a good enough job by sending such requests to a PhantomJS instance, waiting for the page to load, outputting the PhantomJS-rendered HTML to the browser, and saving the HTML to a cache for faster access next time.[1]&lt;p&gt;There are also plenty of SaaS apps that will handle the pre-rendering for you.&lt;p&gt;An additional bonus of doing this is that you can intercept requests from engines and services that don&amp;#x27;t support _escaped_fragment (e.g. Facebook external hit), and always ensure that you serve pre-rendered HTML to them. (e.g. by matching on the user-agent string).&lt;p&gt;[1a] One potential hitch is knowing &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; a page has finished rendering. You could potentially set a variable in your code and have PhantomJS wait for that.&lt;p&gt;[1b] One other hitch is that it&amp;#x27;s possible for PhantomJS to time out e.g. waiting for an external JS library to load. It&amp;#x27;s sensible to check that your HTML output looks vaguely sane before sending to the browser (e.g. for Angular, make sure there are no {{  }} blocks in the HTML), and sending a temporary error code if something looks odd.</text></comment>
<story><title>What every Web Developer should know about SEO</title><url>https://www.polemicdigital.com/2015/01/every-web-developer-know-seo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alphadevx</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd.&lt;p&gt;Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO.  So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that&amp;#x27;s want they want from you.  I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.</text></comment>