In this article I will give you SEO tips for your ASP.NET site. Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic ("natural" or un-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs), by incorporating search engine friendly elements into a website. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
ASP.NET (originally called ASP+) is the next generation of Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP), a feature of their Internet Information Server (IIS). The latest version of ASP.NET is ASP.NET 4.5.2. Well, here are 10 tips on SEO for your ASP.NET website.
1. PAGE TITLE
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.
This is very easy to achieve, and has a big influence on your site's ranking: don't use static titles. The <title> tag is one of the best ways to optimize a site for a special topic or keyword. Don't use a dozen keywords in the title tag, because you're "paying in" for each and every keyword - "paying in" means, that the weight of your site gets divided for all the keywords mentioned in the title tag. Choose one or two keywords, or a keyword-combination, to achieve relevance and a good ranking.
2. HYPERLINK
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. META KEYWORD AND META DESCRIPTION
Add Meta keyword and Meta description tag with relevant contents. Search engines will use these tags to understand what the page offers.
4. DESCRIPTIVE URL
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://asphostportal.com/products.aspx?plan=B11E9918-BEC3-4DAA-A54B-0EC7E8742D9E is not descriptive as http://asphostportal.com/Windows-Shared-Hosting-Plans
5. 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.
6. DESIGN YOUR PAGE LIGHTER
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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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. You can submit your xml sitemap or RSS feed to Google Webmaster tools.
10. 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.