ASP.NET Developers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Patrick
J. Santry
If you're developing for the Web then you should familiarize yourself with some
Search Engine Optimization or SEO concepts. The idea here is to make your
ASP.NET application as friendly as possible for spiders, and the specific
spider we're talking about is Google.
In this article we're going to cover some basic concepts on what you can do in
order to make your ASP.NET application as spider and search engine friendly as
possible.
Postbacks
Your biggest gain in the search engine world is going to avoid the use of
postbacks. For example, say you have content within an ASP panel. But in order
to display that content you use a button and capture a click event in the code
behind, then you change the property of the panel to visible=true once the
button is clicked. This will not work with spiders since they don't "click
buttons" so to speak. The way to write the page so the spider will work with it
is to use a link, and then pass a parameter via a URL, this could be a link
back to the page if you want, but then in the Page_Load event check for the
parameters values to determine what panel or content to display in your page.
I can't understate the importance of eliminating postbacks when it comes to the
Internet. Links are much better when dealing with spiders, avoid the postback,
spiders simply can't do them.
Friendly URLs
Another thing to look into is the use of a URL rewriter in order to create
spider friendly URLs. There are many examples on the Web for creating a URL
rewriter. What a URL rewriter does is translate the parameters over to a
directory like structure. For example, mypage.aspx?param1=1m2=2 becomes
something like: /mypage/1/2/default.aspx. This will enhance the spiders
efficiency in spidering your site and potentially increase the frequency of a
spider doing a deep crawl through your site. You can read evidence of this fact
via the Google FAQ:
"Your pages are dynamically generated. We're able to index dynamically generated
pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that
serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index. In
addition, our crawlers may suspect that a URL with many dynamic parameters
might be the same page as another URL with different parameters. For that
reason, we recommend using fewer parameters if possible. Typically, URLs with
1-2 parameters are more easily crawlable than those with many parameters. Also,
you can help us find your dynamic URLs by submitting them to Google Sitemaps. "
There are plenty of Subscriptions on the Web for URL rewriting:
Titles and Meta Tags
Another issue when generating dynamic pages, and using the same page but either
posting back or linking back via a URL. Be sure to change the Title of the page
and Meta description. If you do not do this then Google is going to "think"
that it is the same page, and the results will not be displayed as high as you
would like. It will definitely affect your search results. One way of tacking
this is to convert both the title, and meta description tags to HTML controls
and then change the inner text, or dynamically generate the text for the tags
when displaying different content.
Here's a sample block of code for dynamically changing the title tag of your Web
page:
First modify the page in order to make the title tag a control you can modify:
<TITLE id="PageTitle" runat="server">
Then in your code you first declare the control as an HTMLGenericControl and set
the properties:
Protected WithEvents PageTitle As System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl
PageTitle.InnerText = MyValue
As mentioned the meta description tag is also important. For example, say you do
a search on keyword contained within the title tag of your document, but not in
the body of the document. Google will display the meta description of your site
in the results. So if every page within your application has the same meta
description value, all the pages are going to look the same, and may not appear
to be relevant to the person doing the search.
You can remedy this using the method above or simply populating the value and
outputting it to the form:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="<%= MetaDescription %>">
Then in the code behind just set the value of MetaDescription
Public MetaDescription As String
MetaDescription = "My meta value...."
Viewstate
Viewstate can be another thing that adversely affects the indexing of your site.
For example, if you view the source of an ASP.NET application you may see
something like the following:
<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" value="dDwtMjA3MTUw...=" />
And the value of this field can continue on for a long time. I've seen cases
where the viewstate is over 100k or more. The problem this has with search
engines is many times a search engine will rank your page based on where a
keyword occurs in the document. For example, say you're searching on ASP.NET
and you first have 100k of viewstate and then your keyword appears within the
HTML document. This could affect how your page ranks for that keyword since
many search algorithms base relavancy on where the keyword appears or how close
to the top of the document it appears.
One way, and one I recommend is to remove the viewstate entirely from the source
of the HTML page. Not only will this benefit your search engine results, but it
will also reduce the download time of the page since your reduce the size of
the page.
The following article is shows you how to remove the viewstate from a web page
that is built in ASP.NET.
http://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/224/site/3507/68/default.aspx
What About AJAX?
AJAX is the recent buzz word to hit the scene in Web development. AJAX provides
the user with a rich experience and a great response to events generated on
your web page. One problem with AJAX is it's client-side generated (hence the
JavaScript in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Since it is generated by
some post-load event generated by the user, make sure that the content you want
spidered is generated statically at first upon the page load.
Closing
There are many issues that cover SEO for Websites, but in this article we're
covering what you as an ASP.NET developer can address. Keep in mind that
spiders are going to behave differently than a person who is browsing your page
would. For more information check out the many sites on SEO by searching on the
topic. Good luck in your Web site promotional efforts!
About the Author
Written by Patrick Santry, ASP.NET MVP, MCSE, recognized speaker, and author of
several books and magazine articles, and owner of WWWCoder.com (http://www.wwwcoder.com).
You can visit his blog at http://blogs.wwwcoder.com/psantry/.
WWWCoder.com provides full text searching on ASP.NET articles, tutorials,
weblogs, podcasts, and more Subscriptions for the aspiring developer.
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