I'm building an online text-based game much like Mafia Wars. I'm using PHP on a Mysql database.
My website will consist of a layout which will hold most on the navigation links and game controls while most of the pages will be called via Ajax calls. I don't want the page to reload completely to give the user a feel of a desktop game.
Now that means that there will be only one real page with various dynamic content.
From a SEO point of view is this good or not ? I mean I will only have one 2 meta tags in my layout and won't be able to put in meta tags in the Ajax called view. Will the search engine spider be able to index my Ajax called view also ?
As a general rule, search engines do not crawl content generated by JavaScript or Ajax. The most notable exception being Google's crawlable Ajax. But that only applies to Google and even then that's a bad idea.
To make your game more search engine friendly you will need to make content available via static links. Without these you essentially have a one page website which is very difficult to rank well. But it can if you obtain enough incoming links which is possible if your game is very good.