Bits about SEO with asp.net

It was my newest research. To find out how to develop search engine friendly web sites in asp.net. In here I will just summarize my findings so that it will help amateurs like me to get an insight into it.

Things to be considered in developing search engine friendly web sites

1. Post back

Post backs are just too detrimental when it comes to search engines. Spiders simply can’t evaluate them. As an example assume you display a block of information based on a button’s click event, spiders won’t be able to index them. If you want them indexed then you will have to avoid the post back and reload the page. A parameter in the url will determine the status of the page, that is whether the button was clicked or not.

2. View state

Another major bottle neck would be the use of view states. Since some view states can be pretty huge after getting collected over a period, the keyword might not be found or will be found deep within the content which in turn means that the rank of the site with respect to the keyword will be far lower than what’s expected. Hence it would be very much advisable if suitable workarounds can be used in place of view states.

3. URL rewriting

This will help you to create spider friendly URL’s. What a URL rewriter basically does is convert the parameters to a directory like structure.

For example, page1.aspx?param1=101&param2=anne becomes something like: /page1/1/anne/default.aspx.

This will help spiders crawl deep into your site and would also increase the efficiency to a substantial level.

4. Titles and Meta information

If these information are not changed all your pages will be considered as the same by search engines, this also means that many of your pages will lose their credibility. So it’s very important to change the title and meta description for each and every page. Say you change the title but not the meta description, but the meta description will be displayed in the search result and it would look irrelevant. So it’s important to use mechanisms by which we ensure that these are changed before deployment.

5. Managing site traffic

Mind you none of us like to work with sites which load at the speed of snails. So if our sites are to be indexed by search engine robots and in the mean time if we want to have an acceptable response time we should place close attention to our site performance before moving to production. Search engine spiders will inevitably drop sites from their indices if they respond too slowly.

6. AJAX

Using Ajax could spell trouble for you, because spiders don’t run java scripts. So at least in the initial sections of your page try to avoid using java scripts. So that spiders can index your pages more accurately, this in turn means that you will be found fasterJ. One simple test you can do to see what spiders will index is to switch off js support and test the page to see what’s going to get indexed.

These are just a few things I learnt from my research. Hope it will be useful.