What is a good example of a strategy for achieving SEO-friendliness in a javascript-heavy application?

Question

Intro

I know this has been asked before but the questions I found were either to specific or to general to provoke the kind of answer I was looking for. The best possible answer I can imagine would be an example using backbone and the least amount of server-side logic possible (no preferred language/framework there).

Problem

I am planning an javascript/ajax-heavy (backbone + mostly-json backend) application that implements a facetted search. Take for example a facetted search of a simple shoe shop application that lets you filter color, brand and type of shoes and sort by price and size or whatever else.

Assume I am using backbone or a similar framework on the client and a json service as a backend.

What would be a good (tradeoff between effort and result) strategy to achieve seo-friendliness as well as a snappy interface?

Resources

A solution that came to my attention is Hijax by reusing client-sided templates on the server-side, as described here: http://duganchen.ca/single-page-web-app-architecture-done-right

Resources that I digested without final conclusion

• http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/web/ajaxcrawling/
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/6194427/818846
• http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/If-I-have-data-that-loads-using-json-JavaScript-will-it-get-indexed-by-Google?q=seo+javascript

Answer 1

The general point in SEO friendliness: It should work without JavaScript.

It's also good for accessibility, so you should do it like this, if the user does not have JavaScript enabled (like the search engine does), it will work.

If he has JavaScript enabled, (like any sane human being does), it will work with all the nifty JavaScript features you've added.

As a general usability rule of thumb: If it works, it should also work without JavaScript!