Using XML and XSLT

I'm designing a hybrid e-business web site model that will have a handful of static html pages (store front, site map, info pages) that I plan to optimize for search engines.

I want to create a online catalog using XML to store the content and then use XSLT to filter the pertinent data the end user wants. I'm planning on integrating xhtml tags (title, meta descriptions, etc.) into the xml pages with the help of namespaces.

I would like to optimize these pages too. I tried to research the subject, but information is scarce.

Can anyone tell me how to optimize xml? How do search engines treat xml? Are there any good resources out there that I could use?

Any help is much appreciated.

Hello,

I do not really understand, how you are going to use XML/XSLT. Do you want the browser to transform the XML? I don't think of that as a good idea, because the support inside of browsers for this is not satisfying. The usual way to do such things is serverside, where you have data structured in XML and the server transforms it using XSLT and sends (X)HTML, so no browser (or search engine) even has to think about XML/XSLT. And doing so there is no problem like you asked for in here, the XSLT stylesheet is the place to include the informations you like and to produce plain (X)HTML. Frameworks like Cocoon are used for this.

I don't think, there is a way to optimize XML for search engines. Content matters, and on the other hand search engines use (X)HTML tags like heading, bold to divide more from less important. XML is structured, but free form, no search engine can imagine, what the tags you named/created are supposed to, and if the content in one tag is more important than the content of another. You can use XHTML tags inside of your XML, of course, and search engines should then index it this way, but I'm not sure, how well spiders can coupe with namespace prefixes on tags like f.e. <xhtml:strong>. Maybe you should use an empty prefix for your XHTML usage.

Regards,
Thorsten

I would say that if you are considering using XSLT to develop your site then you must be fairly technically competant.

In which case you could use these skills to store your data in a database and not XML, and use a scripting language such as PHP to render the information to HTML.

Your site will be easier to maintain and extend.

XSLT is one of the most difficult languages to work with.

Everything has it's ups and downs, but for it's purpose, transforming XML, XSLT is a good choice. And not that difficult, I think (I have more problems putting together the correct XPath, which every other language using XML input should rely on, too). Handling complex XML in PHP or alike is much more difficult.

It really would be interesting to know here, if search engines can work with XML (or treat it like unknown HTML tags, ignoring) and especiallly with Namespaces and Namespace-Prefixes in Tags.

I did find this article that peaked my interest on the whole XML/search engine subject.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/02/11/googlexml.html

You really separate the content from UI in XSLT. I'm not sure how search engines will read the content for XML based content. We have have a little experiement. If it works with bots, I like the idea of placing content in a XMl file.