PE (Progressive Enhancement) Improving Your SEO

Posted on | October 5, 2007 | Comments Off

PE goes hand in hand with graceful degradation, but the strategy is reversed. Instead of allow a page to “degrade” PE starts with basic content, which is suitable for the lowest common denominator of browser software functionality. Then, a designer can add functionality or enhance the presentation and behavior of the page. These enhancements are created using things such as Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript. All of the enhancements are externally linked so that browsers of lesser capabilities don’t have to “eat” data they don’t understand and can’t handle, preventing their Internet connection from being swamped.

The core principles of progressive enhancement are: basic content should be accessible to all browsers; basic functionality should be accessible to all browsers; sparse, semantic markup contains all content; enhanced layout is provided by externally linked CSS; enhanced behavior is provided by unobtrusive, externally linked JavaScript; and end user browser preferences are respected.

You may be wondering what this has to do with you, but progressive enhancement is very important to SEO. PE allows for delivery of content first and foremost, but also provides the opportunity for bells and whistles as an added enhancement. See, search engines are fairly limited in their abilities. Their spiders simply follow HTML links from page to page. If a site doesn’t use progressive enhancement it runs the risk of cutting search engines off from its pages rich content.

PE provides flexible and powerful user experiences with pages always being available. Because the basic content is always accessible, and the markup is clean and easily parsed for structure and intent, it becomes much easier to tune the content to improve SEO results. And that is the result any company wants to see.

Category: Strategy Lab

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