ASP NET 4 Enhancements For Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a method of improving a website’s position in Search Engine result. A better position in the search result will lead to more click through, increasing the website visibility and audience. There a few steps a website owner can do to improve their website search engine ranking.

Microsoft has introduce their Search Engine Optimization Toolkit, it’s an easy start to improve your website Search Engine result. Point at remote website and the SEO Toolkit will start to check your website link and identify any problem and offer suggestion on how to fix them.

ASP.NET 4 includes a lot of new methods, properties, and libraries to work with search engine optimization, including ASP.NET Routing, permanent redirects, and the ability to programmatically specify values for certain tags.

Use ASP.NET Routing to generate SEO Friendly Url

In general it’s recommended to create a short, readable URL that include keywords about the page in the URL itself. Rather than have a URL like yourdomain.com/link/ShowCategoryProduct.aspx?CatId=541, it’s better if you can create URL like yourdomain.com/category/phone/newphone

In the past it’s not easy to create a clean, SEO-friendly URL in ASP.NET. But start with ASP.NET 3.5 sp1, URL rewriting became a lot easier thanks to the ASP.NET Routing system.

ASP.NET Routing cleanly decouples URLs from web page file names and can be used to create clean, terse, SEO-friendly URLs. Specifically, ASP.NET Routing allows a developer to define routes, which map a URL pattern – such as “category/CategoryName/products” – to a class (or web page) that handles the request. Consequently, using ASP.NET Routing you can define a route that sends all requests to http://www.example.com/category/CategoryName/products to an existing web page, such as /link/ShowCategoryProduct.aspx, which would then read in the CategoryName value and display the appropriate products.

Use Permanent Redirects When Appropriate

Every HTTP response sent from the server back to the client includes a status code that provides information to the client about the result of the request. For example, if the server receives a request for a non-existent page, such as yourdomain.com/PageNotFound.aspx, it returns an HTTP status code of 404.

Every ASP.NET developer is familiar with Response.Redirect(url), which redirects the visitor from the current page they requested to the specified url. The way Response.Redirect works behind the scenes is by sending a 302 HTTP status code along with a Location HTTP header that specifies the URL to which the requested resource has moved.

It’s important to understand that the 302 status code indicates that the resource being requested has temporarily moved to a new URL. A client – such as a search engine spider – that receives a 302 status will continue to try the original URL for future requests. There is an alternative status code, 301, that should be used if the resource has been moved permanently. ASP.NET 4 offers a new method, Response.RedirectPermanent, which does a redirect using the 301 status code instead of the 302 status code

So what does this all mean for SEO? If you have an old URL that you no longer want search engines to index or users to visit, but rather want them to use a new URL, use a 301 permanent redirect rather than the 302 temporary redirect.

Programmatically Setting Keywords and Description Tags

ASP.NET offers ways to have this metadata assigned automatically or programmatically. For example, you can programmatically set the page’s title using the Page class’s Title property.

When crawling through the pages in a website, a search engine spider will examine the section to determine more information about the page. A page’s keywords and a human-friendly description of the page may be included in the section through the use of elements.

ASP.NET 4 adds two new properties to the Page class that allow for these two tags to be specified programmatically:

* MetaKeywords

* MetaDescription