Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is used to develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA). By high caliber of being an RIA, and displaying web pages enthusiastically instead of statically, search engines do not identify Silverlight websites in the same way as traditional text-based pages. Per se, if you are functioning with Silverlight and desire to guarantee that information is recognized and ranked by search engines you should make some adjustments in your page design.

How to rank in search engines if you use Silverlight? Web pages are exceedingly ranked in search engine results because the words on the page match the keywords used to search. The existence of dynamic and non standard elements such as script, style, object, and embed tags in the page - all of which are part of Silverlight poses a challenge for search engine optimization.

Search engines are biased towards identifying text and HTML content on Web pages as a means of worth and evaluating data. At this time, they do not distinguish Silverlight content natively. To make Silverlight content indexable by search engines, you can use advances that search engines are already recognizable with, such as combining the islands of Silverlight content with HTML metadata about that content.

Why SEO is sturdy to optimize Silverlight, is it because of Rich application. Microsoft Silverlight is a transformative technology. Many website owners who’re originally thrilled at the cutting edge presentation shown on their websites are later founded their websites unexpectedly fail to show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). In those cases, webmaster failed to account for search engine optimization (SEO) when they executed Silverlight. Silverlight apps are packaged with .xap extension. Regrettably, search engines can't easily read Silverlight XAP files. But as of today, you'd be prudent to provide to what the search engines already do very well: read text. This means you require accumulation to text based information like metadata and many to Silverlight objects.

Tips to optimize Silverlight based Rich Web Applications for Search Engines

Here is a few ways for you to guarantee that your web pages shaped with Silverlight are acknowledged and ranked by search engines. If you are scheduling to create a Silverlight application, there are things you can do to guarantee that your application is revealed and returned by search engines.

• Combine HTML with Silverlight content on a page : This advance engages mixing HTML text with Silverlight content in the same page so that it delivers richness in functionality while the native HTML content is still identified by search engines. Consider designing your Silverlight content in such a way that it placed inside, or around, a block of text.

• Put a strong <H1> title in text above the Silverlight application : The words that you apply in your titles, page and section headers, body content, and exchange content play a significant role in how the search engines find and index your content, and also how a user searches your content.

• Use captions under the Silverlight application with an <H2> title tag to integrate your target keywords : Comparable to point #2, if you add H2 captions using the keywords you are targeting, this simply offers more proof to the search engines as to what the page is about and will result in more traffic to the page.

• Incorporate the keyword you are targeting in the Silverlight application name : For example if you are demanding to draw visitors penetrating on the term “web hosting”, name your Silverlight application “webhosting.xap”.

• Use the object tag in its place of embeds tag : This allocates you to provide option nested content if Silverlight is not installed.

• Put understandable text under the Silverlight application using a Silverlight Content Div ID : The Silverlight content div id should include the precise same content in the Silverlight application.