SEO Tips For Your ASP.NET Website

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. A successful search engine optimization campaign will have, as part of the improvements, carefully select, relevant, keywords which the on-page optimization will be designed to make prominent for search engine algorithms. Search engine optimization is broken down into two basic areas: on-page, and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to website elements which comprise a web page, such as HTML code, textual content, and images. Off-page optimization refers, predominantly, to backlinks (links pointing to the site which is being optimized, from other relevant websites).

SEO Tips For Your ASP.NET Website

For many websites, “organic” search results from Google are the most important source for traffic. This means that it is extremely important that content on the website gets a high ranking in the search results, and is also presented well between other search results. In this post I am going to implement some basic SEO techniques in ASP.NET so that the pages of the site can be found and indexed as well as possible by Google and other search engines.

Avoid duplicate content

A mistake made very (very) often: when you register a URL and point it to your web server, you're using the "www"-subdomain in most cases. "www" is nothing else than a subdomain.

For search engines, this is a major problem - which URL is the main URL? When content gets published, which URL is the one where the information was published first? For Google and other search engines, "www.example.com" and "example.com" are two different URLs.

Choose individual, good <title>s

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 thetitle 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.

Clean up your source code

Something hard to believe but still true: clean up your source code and try to minimize the code as much as possible. Follow these rules:

• don't use inline CSS, use external stylesheets whenever possible
• don't use inline JavaScript, use external .js files instead
• don't leave HTML-comments
• don't use massive line-breaking (twenty lines with only a linebreak or something similar)
• don't use viewstate when not necessary
• don't use a <form runat="server> when not necessary (comes with hidden fields)

The better the relation between the content (==text) and the (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) code, the better your ranking will be. The smaller the source code, the better this relation will be.

Use <strong>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>

Use the HTML markups <strong>, <h1>...<h6> regulary - use them to structure the site's content. These markups are made for weighing some words more than others - so it is for search engines. Use these markups whenever it's useful to do so.

Keyword density

Keyword density is very important for a site's ranking for a special keyword. Imagine you have a site about "free source code" - well, you should defiantly try to mention this keyword combination as often as you can - as long as it makes sense, of course. Try to reach a keyword density bigger than 3.5 - so mention "free source code" 3.5 times per 100 words.

Get linked!

Links to your site have the biggest influence to your sites' ranking. Try to get linked from as many other websites as possible. Use social bookmarking and other social services like digg.com to get more links and more visitors.