SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, plays an important role in boosting any publically facing online presence, so it is to ASP.NET sites. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. bring with a large part of traffic to ASP.NET sites. As a result of that, making some improvements to the search relevancy of your ASP.NET site is one of the most effective ways to get more site traffic from search engine queries, greatly increasing the revenue you make through your ASP.NET site either directly or indirectly. The post covers some of the tips you can take advantage of for improving your ASP.NET site’ SEO.

Create an Unique Title for Each Page

As you know, when a person uses Google search engine, query terms will be shown as bolded text in search results. Hence, adding page title that is short, descriptive, meaningful, containing keywords and relevant information to content of the page for every page, making it noticeable and attracting more attention is necessary especially when you take your ASP.NET site seriously. Remember not to insert repeated phrase on the beginning of the title of every page or to use too long titles over 65 characters.

SEO and User Friendly URLs

The URL (or Uniform Resource Locator) for any given page specifies the address where it is located and the mechanism (protocol) by which is can be retrieved. Ideally, the URL should describe the content and include keywords that are also present in the page title, description and content so that it can be easier to read by human visitors and also be better ranked on search engines. In addition, an ASP.NET site with SEO friendly URLs will be more secure as you are allowed to hide id or even file extension.

Make Crawlable Links

Since search engines are set to crawl a page only when it is linked via a hyperlink, you’d better ensure that all the links in your page are hyperlinks before posting them publically. As well, avoid using linkbutton or Javascript navigations because they are not search engine friendly anyway.

Use Meta Description and Keywords Tags

Meta description and Meta keywords with relevant contents have been a significant part for SEO all the time for the reason that search engines often use the tags to understand what the page is about. That is, you will receive more visits when you have catchy meta description and keywords tags, even if you fail to rank first in search results. Similar to page title, you can set meta tags in markup and dynamically from codebehind file.

Handle ViewState Properly

Microsoft ASP.NET ViewState is an encoded string that is used for creating custom server controls or doing more advanced page techniques on postback. At the top of every page, you can easily find the string being saved in a hidden form field, which can get very large thus causing slower downloads. It makes no sense to keep ViewState on as it hasn’t any search value at all. Instead, it is a real obstacle for search engines when attempting to seek the real content in your page. Therefore, for search engine optimization purpose, you need learn to handle the ViewState in your ASP.NET site page properly and efficiently. If necessary, you can choose to turn ViewState off for some non-required controls.

Make SEO Friendly Pagers

Pageing in ASP.NET data controls makes use of javascript and postback by default, but search engine spiders tend to avoid checking the links using Javascript. Consequently, changing your paging strategy to use custom paging for Repeater, GridView and other more data controls rather than using default pager could be a good solution to make SEO friendly pagers.

Limit Page Links

There used to be a limit in number of links that some popular search engines index on one page. Though the rule has changed today, limiting the page links in your pages is still a good way to prevent link spamming and preserve your ASP.NET site rank.

Build SiteMap

A sitemap is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. Having a sitemap file means a guide to users and search engines for easily navigating the pages of your ASP.NET site. Usually, a normal ASP.NET site requires two sitemaps—an html sitemap file used by the website users and an xml sitemap file for the search engines.

Summary

As you could see, improving ASP.NET site’s SEO is not difficult as long as you know some basic knowledge of coding and website management. Your site was probably put on the same server as hundreds or thousands of other sites. It could lead to slow speeds when many clients try to access this server at the same time. Therefore, ensure that you choose the right hosting from a reputable provider – one who can meet all of ASP.NET’s hosting requirements: a limited number of sites per server, server hardware support, server caching support, ASP.NET expert support. Some popular and well-known hosting providers recommended by ASP.NET user are ASPHostPortal, HostForLIFEASP.NET, UKWindowsHostASP.NET