When running an online business, majority of our focus is on the design, architecture of the website and how efficiently it displays our product. These are not the only things that are required to target the infinite Internet audience. One need to keep in mind that the main source of audience come from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. So the application or the website should be able to follow simple rules and handle your business efficiently. ASP.NET application is spreading rapidly and if you are using an ASP.NET website few simple guidelines has to be considered. The below mentioned points need to be implemented:
Page Titles
Page titles between tags is one important thing that many fail to practice in SEO. When a search is made in Google, these titles show up as links in the result. So that explains its importance. The common mistake among website owners is giving the same title for all pages. Page titles drive traffic to your site, hence it is important to have a proper title to attract visitors. Adding titles is not as hard as you imagine. If you have a product catalog use your product name as title. You can also choose to give a different title that is related to your product.
Meaningful URL
URLs that are long with query parameters do not look neat and it is difficult for the visitor to remember. Instead use formatted URLs for your static pages. URL which has a meaning explains the content in your website. Although experts agree with using an URL that has query parameters, it is better to have a meaningful URL. Components like UrlRewritingNet can be used for this purpose. Mapping support in URL is offered by IIS7 which has plenty of features.
Structure of the Content
Content without a structure is not possible. You will have titles, headings, sub headings, paragraphs and others. How would you emphasize some quotes or important points in your content? If you follow the below mentioned steps, the structure of your content will be semantically correct.
· Divide long stories or parts using headings. Short paragraphs make more sense to the readers. Use tags to bring beauty to your content.
· If you want to emphasize an important point or quote, place them between tags.
Visitors can create structured content if you use FCKEditor and the like. Integrating these to your website is not complex.
Clean the Source Code
Don’t panic, it is advisable to clean up the source code and minimize the number of codes. The following simple steps will assist you in cleaning the source code: You can use
· External stylesheets and not inline CSS
· -js files instead of inline JavaScript
· HTML comments is not encouraged
· Avoid massive line breaking
· Avoid using viewstate when not required
The relation between the content and the code (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) determines the ranking of your website. Smaller source codes help build a strong relation.
Crawlable Site
Do not use
· Silver or flash light for menus or to highlight information
· Menus based on JavaScript
· Menus based on buttons
· Intro-pages
Do use
· Simple tags wherever possible
· Sitemap
· “Alt” for images
· RSS
Test the Site
What happens to the requests that are sent when the site is slow? Sometimes requests are sent by robots and if they are unable to connect to your site continuously, they drop the site from their index. Enable your site to respond fast to requests even during peak hours. Moreover, visitors don’t like to visit slow sites. Use the various tools available and conduct the stress test for your site. Perform this and locate all the weak parts of the site. Fix them so that your site gets indexed.
Test the AJAX site
Spiders can only run a few parts of your AJAX website because they don’t run JavaScripts. Spiders can only analyze the data and hence they remain invisible to robots. The AJAX sites do not get indexed which does not help in search engine optimization. To make the site spider friendly, try and keep away from initial content loading into the JavaScript. You can also follow this only for pages that you like to index. Make it easy for robots so that they can navigate. Try this simple trick to see how your AJAX site will appear to the robots. Disable JavaScript from the browser and visit your AJAX site. You can view the pages which robots will index.
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