Searchability and Indexability in Silverlight Sites

I got a question from a friend last week that I thought would be a great question to post the answer to about Searchability and Indexability with Silverlight apps. Here is the question,

"I have created a site and I followed the approach something like this : I have created 5 projects for five pages and added the five xap in the main SilverlightProject. and then I have write the code something like this for each menu buttons : HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("/Default.aspx",urikind.relative) ;
My question is : Does this help me solving providing the unique url's for search engine optimization ? "

my respone: linking in the xap does not expose those pges to search engines as such but does lay the ground for exposing those pages to the robots/search engines. to expose them to the search engine for indexing the best method is to use the install experience to expose the different elements as links in the html. remember as of late the search engines see nothing inside the xap. specifically they only see the html and a custom install experience provides not only a better user experience to users with out silverlight but that also is what the search engines will see.

Indexablity for Search Engines in Silverlight

I saw a question as of late around the indexability of Silverlight for search engines much like an html based web site or web application. I know from my work with Microsoft and the Silverlight team that this has been taken into account and goes well with the toolablity story of microsoft. Compiled Silverlight is in a 'xap' file which is really a zip which is easily opened and any text based files, xml or xaml can be indexed and this was done with intent for this purpose. That being said that doesn't mean that all the of this is working up front as to my knowledge none of the spiders actually search zips yet but we expect that to happen at some point. Assumping that this happens then we want to make sure that our Xaml has logical names related to the content for all our x:name elements and that they are not only included in the application dll but as loose xaml in the xap.

Another thing to consider though is that as mentioned zips(xaps) are not indexed yet so it is a good idea to do the same kinds of things to our host files (actually is a good idea even if the zips are indexed) that you would do to optimized the page for search indexing. ie, meta tags, install experience code etc.

Happy Search indexing optimizationizing...