New Tutorial – Silverlight Analytics and SEO
I recently converted the “myVBProf.com” site from an “aspx” design to a Silverlight application. The original site used Google Analytics to collect and analyze usage and I needed to do something similar with the Silverlight site. This new tutorial explains the options I finally settled on to collect data on usage. I use both a “custom” approach where I create an ADO.NET Data Service to add “time stamp” data to an SQL database. I also use the Silverlight HTML Bridge to make use Google Analytics.
I also wanted to be sure that search engine spiders could find and index my new site. Since most of the key words used by the search engines were embedded within the Silverlight application, and not available to the spiders, I consulted a number of sources to see what strategies made the most sense. I finally settled on the advice of Tim Heuer who suggested that I “create alternate content for those pages and put it in the object tag area so that non SL readers (like search spiders) will see that instead of your app.” I show how I did this in the tutorial.
bill