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1. Add descriptive and
unique Page Title for every page
Every page in your website should have a unique and
descriptive page title that can describe what the page offers. You can set the
Page Title either declaratively or in the code behind file. Refer below,
In ASPX,
<%@ Page Language="C#"
AutoEventWireup="true" Title="My Home Page" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
In code behind,
Page.Title = "My Home Page";
2. Links should be
hyperlinks, no linkbutton or javascript navigation for crawlable links
Make sure all your links in your page are hyperlinks.
Search engines can crawl a page only if it is linked through a hyper
link(anchor tag). Javascript navigations are not search engine friendly since
search engines will not understand it.
3. Use javascript
navigation for site related pages that have no search values
Page rank is distributed across the links on your page.
Some of the internal website pages like About us, disclaimer, Registration,
login, contact us, user profile pages can be navigated through javascript so
that the page rank are not distributed to them. Doing like this will make rest
of the crawlable content links benefited.
4. Add Meta Keyword
and Description tag for every page
Add Meta keyword and Meta description tag with relevant
contents. Search engines will use these tags to understand what the page
offers. You can dynamically set the meta tags from codebehind file using the
below code,
HtmlHead head = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;
HtmlMeta metasearch1 = new HtmlMeta();
HtmlMeta metasearch2 = new HtmlMeta();
metasearch1.Name = "descriptions";
metasearch1.Content = "my personal site";
head.Controls.Add(metasearch1);
metasearch2.Name = "keywords";
metasearch2.Content = "ASP.Net,C#,SQL";
head.Controls.Add(metasearch2);
The above code will add the below Meta tags to output
html.
<meta name="descriptions" content="my
personal site" />
<meta name="keywords"
content="ASP.Net,C#,SQL" />
In ASP.Net 4.0, Microsoft added 2 new properties on the
Page directive (Page object) that lets you to define the Meta keywords and
Description declaratively and dynamically from codebehind.
In ASPX,
<%@ Page Language="C#"
AutoEventWireup="true" MetaKeywords="asp.net,C#"
MetaDescription="This is an asp.net site that hosts asp.net
tutorials" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs"
Inherits="_Default" %>
In codebehind,
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Page.MetaKeywords = "asp.net,C#";
Page.MetaDescription = "This is an asp.net
site that hosts asp.net tutorials.";
}
The similar can thing can be achieved in previous versions
of .NetFramework by using a custom BasePage class. Read the below article to
know more.
Adding
Custom Property to Page Directive in ASP.Net 2.0
5. Make descriptive
urls
Make your website URL descriptive. URL’s that has lots
of query string values, numeric ids are not descriptive. It will provide enough
information what the page offers. For example, http://www.example.com/products.aspx?catid=C91E9918-BEC3-4DAA-A54B-0EC7E874245E
is not descriptive as http://www.example.com/Electronics
Apart from other parameters, search engines will also
consider the website url to match your page for a searched keywords.
Read the below article in codedigest.com to make search
engine friendly url’s in asp.net.
Search
Engine Friendly URL’s Using Routing in ASP.Net 3.5
You can also use URL rewriting modules for this.
6. Add Alt for
images, Title for Anchor
Add ALT text for images and Title for hyperlinks. The
ALT text will be displayed when the browser cannot display the image for some
reasons. Search engines will not be able to read the image and ALT text will
give some hint about the image which the search engine can use.
<asp:Image ID="imLogo"
runat="server" AlternateText="My company Logo"
ImageUrl="logo.gif" />
<asp:HyperLink ID="hpHome" runat="server"
ToolTip="My Website Home" Text="Home"
NavigateUrl="Home.aspx"></asp:HyperLink>
The above ASP.Net markup will produce the below
output,
<img id="imLogo" src="logo.gif"
alt="My company Logo" style="border-width:0px;" />
<a id="hpHome" title="My Website
Home" href="Home.aspx">Home</a>
7. Handle ViewState
properly, don’t overload the ViewState
ViewState is an encoded string that is populated by
ASP.Net to maintain the state of the controls on postback. This string is saved
to a hidden field at the top of every page and gets transported with the HTML
output. Most of the times, the ViewState string will be long and heavier. Since
ViewState has no search value, it will be a real hindrance for search engines
when trying to find the real content in your page. Some search engine may have
some restriction on the page size.
Hence, try to handle the ViewState in your page efficiently.
Turn off ViewState for the control that doesn’t require it.
You can set EnableViewState="false" to turn
off viewstate at control level, page level(@Page directive) and config
level(<pages> section).
8. Design your page
lighter with less images, less flash and less Silverlight content
Try to design your page with very less media contents
like images, flash objects, Silverlight objects, ActiveX objects, etc. Search
engines can only read HTML contents. A page that is entirely build on flash or
Silverlight are not search engine friendly since the search engine robots cannot
find any textual contents in those pages.
9. Do Permanent
Redirect with proper return codes to retain the Page Rank
If you have moved a page to a different URL or changed
your domain to new domain then you should do a redirect to the new location by
returning an http status code of 301- Permanent Redirect. This is called
permanent redirection. This will make sure the existing page rank is copied to
the new page.
Read the below codedigest article that discusses some
of the scenario where we can use permanent redirect for search engine
optimization.
How
to Redirect URLs/domain Without www to With www and vice versa - Permanent
Redirection in ASP.Net?
SEO
improvements in ASP.Net 4.0
10. Add rel=”nofollow” to external
links
Add rel=”nofollow” to the user contributed links that
are external to the site. Sometimes, the external links posted by a user may
have security threats (it may download a malware which will infect the users)
or possibly a spam generating site. Doing like this will secure your site from
getting penalized from search engines.
Sometime back when you add rel=”nofollow” to an anchor
tag, search engines will not share the page rank with that link. This makes the
remaining links on the page to take more share of the page rank. Currently, the
implementation is changed where the page rank is shared but it no longer allows
other links on the page to take more of the share. Read here
to know more about how nofollow affect the page rank previously and now.
11. Use Header tags
Use Header tags (H1,H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6) wherever
appropriate instead of styling the text in SPAN tags. These Header tags are
search engine friendly. You can use this tag efficiently to organize your page
headings and sub headings.
For example, you can put your page top most heading in
H1, sub heading in H2, sub-sub heading in H3, etc that represents a proper
hierarchy of your page contents.
12. No inline CSS styles and
Javascript codes
Always keep your CSS styles and javascript defined in a
separate file. This makes your page clean, simple and light-weight. The search
engines can find the page content easily and can efficiently index it.
13. Unique URL for a Page
Search engines like Google will treat a page with url
http://www.example.com/Default.aspx as different from
http://example.com/Default.aspx even though they are serving the same page on a
website. This may lead to penalize your website for duplicate content issue by
the search engine. Hence, always allow single unique URL to identify a page.
You can handle this scenario by doing a permanent redirect to one url. Read the
below article to handle these scenario in ASP.Net.
How
to Redirect URLs/domain Without www to With www and vice versa - Permanent
Redirection in ASP.Net?
You can also Google Webmaster Tools for doing this restriction.
14. Make SEO friendly pagers
Always construct search engine friendly pager links
when displaying list of items in a summary page. For example, product list,
article list page, etc. A link is called search engine friendly if it is anchor
tag (<A>) that has a reachable url in its href property through GET
request.
Read the below article to build search engine friendly
pager for GridView control in Asp.Net.
Search
Engine Friendly Pager for ASP.Net GridView control
15. Limit the number of links per page
Previously there was a limit in number of links (100
links per page) the Google search engine will index on a page. This restriction
is now no more. But it is still advisable to have limited number of links in
your pages to avoid any adverse effect on your site rank. This is to prevent
link spamming and to preserve the page rank.
16. Build SiteMap
Always have a sitemap file that can guide users and
search engines to navigate your site pages easily. It is really necessary to
have 2 site maps for a site, an xml sitemap file used by the search engines and
an html sitemap file for the website users. Refer here
to know more creating xml sitemap for search engines. You can submit your xml
sitemap or RSS feed to Google Webmaster tools.
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