I’m building an AJAX webapp that will be hosted on Amazon EC2 at webapp.site.com. In support of this app I’m creating a blog that will be hosted by a simple web host at blog.site.com. The main point of the blog is to drive traffic to the webapp.
What I’d like to do is have the two sites be viewed as a single entity from an SEO point of view. By this I mean that most of my good SEO-rich content will be written to the blog, but I want the people who want to see that content to also be directed to the webapp.
I know the obvious thing to do is to have the webapp at http://www.site.com/webapp and the blog at http://www.site.com/blog, but since very different hosting is being used, that won’t work.
I’m playing around with how to accomplish this, and am thinking that I can embed the blog into the webapp in an IFrame, or embed the webapp into the blog as an IFrame. I’m not sure that either approach will work or even be any good.
I can’t be the first person to come across this issue. So how can I best use an SEO-rich site to seamlessly drive traffic to my webapp?
You can run both sites under some random url like http://(blog|app).bycompanybackend.com and put a reverse proxy in front of the two. The reverse proxy will map the subdomains to directories like http://mycompanyfrontend.com/(blog|app). It will also do the URL conversions in HTML, CSS and Javascript. The reverse proxy can run on Amazon on a low-powered instance. It bears no load.
Edit: The IFrame-Approach is really bad because search engines will send your visitors to the contents of the iframe. So they will only see a frame-less blog without any menu and without seeing your app.