ASP.Net 4 SEO Improvements
Before discussing about ASP.Net 4 SEO Improvements methodology
firstly we have focused on why SEO? Search
engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site. A large percentage of traffic to sites now
comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will
lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can
directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).
ASP.Net 4 SEO Improvements:
ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can
help you to further optimize your site for SEO.
Some of these new features include:
1.
New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription
properties
2.
New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web
Forms
3.
New Response.RedirectPermanent() method
Below are details about how you can take advantage of them
to further improve your search engine relevancy.
New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties:
One simple recommendation to improve the search relevancy of
pages is to make sure you always output relevant “keywords” and “description”
<meta> tags within the <head> section of your HTML. For example:
<head>
<title>Abstraction
in c# with example - MindStick</title>
<meta name="Keywords" content="C#.Net, .Net, OOPS Concept, OOPS Basic" />
<meta name="Description" content="Abstraction in c# with example, In object-oriented software,
complexity is managed by using abstraction. " />
</head>
One of the nice improvements with
ASP.NET 4 Web Forms is the addition of two new properties to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription that make programmatically setting these values
within your code-behind classes much easier and cleaner.
protected void Page_Load(object
sender, EventArgs e)
{
Page.Title = "Your Title Here";
Page.MetaDescription = "Your description here";
Page.MetaKeywords = "Your
keywords here";
}
In addition to setting the
Keywords and Description properties programmatically in your code-behind, you
can also now declaratively set them within the @Page directive at the
top of .aspx pages. The below snippet demonstrates how to-do
this:
<%@ Page Title="Abstraction in c# with example" keywords="C#.Net, .Net, OOPS Concept, OOPS
Basic, Abstraction C#, Abstraction in C#.Net" Description="Abstraction in c# with example, In
object-oriented software, complexity is managed by using abstraction." Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/MySite.master" %>
New URL Routing support for
ASP.NET Web Forms:
URL routing was a capability we first introduced with
ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, and which is already used within ASP.NET MVC applications to
expose clean, SEO-friendly “web 2.0” URLs. URL routing lets you configure an application
to accept request URLs that do not map to physical files. Instead, you can use
routing to define URLs that are semantically meaningful to users and that can
help with search-engine optimization (SEO).
For example; the URL for a traditional page that displays
product categories might look like below:
http://www.mindstick.com/DevelopersSection.aspx?Cat=1
For more details in URL Routing check out the following
link:
http://www.mindstick.com/Articles/9992a0bc-90f5-4f04-823a-31f901b61643/?URL%20Routing%20in%20ASP%20Net%203%205%20I
New Response.RedirectPermanent() method:
It is pretty common within web
applications to move pages and other content around over time, which can lead
to an accumulation of stale links in search engines.
In ASP.NET, developers have often
handled requests to old URLs by using the Response.Redirect()
method to programmatically forward a request to the new URL. However, what many developers don’t realize
is that the Response.Redirect()
method issues an HTTP 302 Found
(temporary redirect) response, which results in an extra HTTP round trip when
users attempt to access the old URLs.
Search engines typically will not follow across multiple redirection
hops – which means using a temporary redirect can negatively impact your page
ranking. You can use the SEO Toolkit to
identify places within a site where you might have this issue.
ASP.NET 4 introduces a new Response.RedirectPermanent(string url)
helper method that can be used to perform a redirect using an HTTP 301 (moved
permanently) response. This will cause
search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects to
store and use the new URL that is associated with the content. This will enable your content to be indexed
and your search engine page ranking to improve.
Below is an example of using the
new Response.RedirectPermanent()
method to redirect to a specific URL:
Response.RedirectPermanent("OurFolderPath/MyPage.aspx");
ASP.NET 4 also introduces new Response.RedirectToRoute(string
routeName) and Response.RedirectToRoutePermanent(string
routeName) helper methods that can be used to redirect users using
either a temporary or permanent redirect using the URL routing engine.