title: Angular and SEO - creating static HTML version
body: <p>I'm about to start an Angular app and I'm looking into how to make it SEO-friendly. I've been reading <a href="http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/11/angularjs-and-seo.html" rel="nofollow">this article</a> which talks about saving a static version of the dynamically-generated HTML (via AJAX etc) and having the bots scan that.</p>
  
  <p>The article talks about how Google/Bing, on finding a hashbang URL like</p>
  
  <pre><code>http://somesite.com/#!/some_token
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...redirect to and crawl</p>
  
  <pre><code>http://somesite.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/some_token
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Two questions arise:</p>
  
  <p>1) What the hell is that <code>_escaped_fragment_=</code> - should it literally be that or should I replace that with... something? The article doesn't explain its nature.</p>
  
  <p>2) How, and how often, should I take a static snapshot of my HTML?</p>
  
  <p>In a previous project of mine, docula.net, I snapshotted the JS-generated content manually by passing a query string token, which invoked a dump of the DOM to a PHP save script over AJAX. Is that the gist of how you would SEO-ify an Angular app, or should the process somehow be more automated?</p>