Professional Search Engine Optimization (Seo). Developer’s Guide to SEO

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The solution is pretty simple. A typical popup link looks like this:

<a href=”#“ onClick=”window.open(‘page.html’, ‘mywindow’, ‘width=800,height=600’);

return false;”>Click here.</a>

You could make the popup spiderable by changing the link to this:

<a href=”page.html” onclick=”window.open(this.href, ‘mywindow’, ‘width=800,height

=600’); return false;” target=”_blank”>Click here.</a>

This still presents a popup in a JavaScript-enabled browser. The

onclick

event uses the

window.open

method to open

this.href

— the

href

attribute of that link. Then it returns

false

to prevent the link

itself from being honored. On the other hand, the link is still present, so a search engine is able to navi-

gate to it without executing the JavaScript code.

Alternatively, you could simulate a popup by using a regular link that opens a new window via the

target=”_blank”

attribute, and have the page itself automatically resize after it displays. Technically,

it’s not

really

a popup. It’s a new window that automatically resizes — but the effect is similar. The link

for such a “popup” would look like this:

<a href=”page.html” target=”_blank”>Click here</a>

You must include JavaScript on the linked page to resize the window. To do so, place the following code

in the

onload

attribute of the document’s body tag with the appropriate parameters:

Additionally, you can handle the window’s

resize

event to keep the window’s size constant:

Using

setTimeout

(which in this example causes the window to be resized after 100 milliseconds)

ensures the code will work with all browsers.

In addition to improving search engine visibility for your popups, you have also accomplished a usability

enhancement, because both of these popup varieties will degrade to opening content in a new browser

window via the

target=”_blank”

attribute if a user ’s JavaScript functionality is disabled.

These techniques are demonstrated in the upcoming exercise. You’ll also explore a usability concern

with spiderable popups.

Implementing Popup Navigation

Some sort of navigation should be present to allow the user to get back to the parent page if he or she

arrives at the popup through a search engine, or from an external web site. Because popups are not

usually created to contain contextual and navigational elements, this presents a problem.

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Chapter 6: SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript

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