SEO way to handle ajax requests used for reporting

Question

We would like to perform some link tracking in our application but I am unsure of the proper way to handle this.

For example with on our search results page we obviously have a bunch of search results. We would like the link for each item to:

a) link to the actual item description b) fire off an ajax request to a url that handles link tracking

First off, is this the proper way to do this? And secondly what status should I return from the ajax request that handles link tracking?