ASP SEO dos and don'ts

fundamentals for dynamic ASP sites

[poet]

I am creating a dynamic ASP.Net site that will feature multiple online magazines. Articles and photos will be associated with the originating publication, but will be available to all publications to run with credit. I have an experienced programer who is creating the code, but I need to advise him in the fine art of optimizing the site for SEs. Thoughts on fundamentals?

(At the moment we are concentrating on linking pages to one another with the idea that this will help to share PR among the pages.)

Cheers,
Poet

[sharbel]

Get him to implement some URL re-writing so that pages like www.mydomain.com/article.asp?aid=1 will rewrite to www.mydomain.com/article.aspx/1/article-title.asp

[poet]

Thanks, Sharbel.

In other words, make the urls look like directories instead of instructions for the ASP engine.

What about the following advice that I have, in snippets, in my notes: avoid long query strings; avoid query strings that lead to identical, or nearly identical pages or that "trap" a spider?

[sharbel]

I would say to avoid querystrings all together, that was what I was trying to convey in my first post. Try to replace the?id=100 to /100/keyword-product-name.asp .. and the rewrite engine would, on the server, repoint the request to the correct page/querystring.

Then, of course on the product page mentioned above, you are going to want him to make sure the Title tag, H1 tag, and ad copy have the keyword in there. Same thing, to a lesser extent with the META tags. So, you don't want each product page's title to have "Myecommercesite.com we sell for less!".. You would want each Title tag to dynamically change based on the current product like "Red Widget ¦ keyword"... same thing for the H1 etc etc

[poet]

<<Then, of course on the product page mentioned above, you are going to want him to make sure the Title tag, H1 tag, and ad copy have the keyword in there. Same thing, to a lesser extent with the META tags.>>

Sharbel:
Why does the rule apply to META tags "to a lesser extent"? Because the META tags are not as important in any case?

[mrMister]

Seeing as this is turning in to a nice reference thread, I'll post these here for any beginners...

With ASP.Net, it's important to realise that anything that relies on a postback won't be crawled by the search engines. So steer well clear of postbacks for the areas of your site that need to be crawlable. Make sure your links are actually links and not postbacks.

Also, make sure that you are fully aware of how your controls work under the hood, I've seen people using menu controls that are created using JavaScript which the search engines won't follow.

[MrSpeed]

-No session variables in the URL
-No AJAX or server.executes
You want bookmarkable, distinct urls for all content.

You are doing a good thing by trying pull back on the reigns of the programmer.

[poet]

This is really helpful guys. One thing is still bothering me, which is how to get domain names without losing content and page rank on the main site.

I have a lot of content that I want my authors (I am a book publisher) to provide. The authors wanna write, but they also are vain and want their own domain names. But I want their content to be in the main site, so it looks good to G.

I am setting this up on a dedicated server. What will happen if I create one page mini-sites with each domain name, then use a hyperlink to the rest of that author's pages? I would have 300 words of text on each mini-site.

Will Google get suspicious and see a "link farm" if I have 20 or 30 mini-sites on the server that link to the main site? Other problems?

[BradleyT]

For the URL re-write have him get Scott Mitchell's DLL. It works like a charm, even in 2.0

[poet]

BradleyT:
I have found some interesting Scott Mitchell stuff via Google. But, could you give me a url for the DLL that you are talking about?

[sharbel]

Hi sorry for delay in responding. I said to a lesser extent the META tags because they really have less emphasis by the engines anymore.. page titles, h1 tags, page content are more important.

The article that Scott wrote is on MSDN [msdn.microsoft.com...]

[poet]

sharbel:

Between tags and text, which are the things that I need to have the programmer give me control panel access to? and which can I change when I edit the text of an article?

Meta-tags need to be editable from the control panel.
H1 tags, no need to edit, cuz you always want them to characterize the headline of an article.

Keywords in title and first paragraph--editable along with the article.

Other tags that I need to require special access to be able to optimize?

[sharbel]

Yeah, I would request that you can give a 'friendly' name to the article itself when you are making the article.

So instead of www.domain.com/articles/293/generic.asp I would want to be www.domain.com/articles/293/specified-article-name.asp

So your entry page for the article might be like this:

Article Title(for <title> tag):
Friendly file name(described above):
Description(META descript):
Keywords (useless, but hey why not):

Aside from all that, it's always a good idea not to use a Rich Text editor for your article that will add a lot of bulk to the text itself. Try to have a good stylesheet defined for the articles, with rules for <p><div><a> etc so that your articles are wrapped in an article container <div id="articleContainer"> or whatever, and they will automatically receive their styling from the stylesheet. This way, your articles are much lighter weight, without all the garbage inline-styling from the rich text HTML editor.

[poet]

Sharbel:

This is extremely helpful.

One dumb question. Wuold the "keywords" that the user enters for each article be "meta" or would they display at the head of the article?

Article Title(for <title> tag):
Friendly file name(described above):
Description(META descript):
Keywords (useless, but hey why not):

Cheers,

Poet

[sharbel]

Yeah, I was referring to meta keywords (<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2 etc" />) They mean pretty much nothing to most engines nowadays, but who knows down the road.

[poet]

Sharbel:

On article formatting and avoiding the Rich Text Editor HTML generator . . .

What if we required users to paste their text into Notepad and only then to paste it into the cms? Would this solve the problem? Quick and dirty, but maybe it would save some programming work for now.

<<Aside from all that, it's always a good idea not to use a Rich Text editor for your article that will add a lot of bulk to the text itself. Try to have a good stylesheet defined for the articles, with rules for <p><div><a> etc so that your articles are wrapped in an article container <div id="articleContainer"> or whatever, and they will automatically receive their styling from the stylesheet. This way, your articles are much lighter weight, without all the garbage inline-styling from the rich text HTML editor. >>

Poet

[sharbel]

You could try that, but Notebook might also strip out any paragraph structure too (I could be wrong).. so the user might have to put in their line breaks/paragraphs when pasting from Notebook. Again, I could be wrong.

[poet]

Sharbel:

<You could try that, but Notebook might also strip out any paragraph structure too (I could be wrong).. so the user might have to put in their line breaks/paragraphs when pasting from Notebook. Again, I could be wrong.>

I think you are right. When the Editor pastes into Notepad, he needs to re-break his paragraphs. This takes some time, but it is foolproof.

Poet

[poet]

I am also wondering when we trigger G penalties for stuffing keywords, creating a domain farm, creating a link farm.

I have a dedicated server. I want one large site with lots of content, my editors want their own domain names. In the past, Tedster seemed to suggest that it would be OK to create small one page entry sites on this server. Each would have a domain name and 250 words of content.

But I am worried that G will not like the pattern of 30 small sites from one IP address using html links to a single large site on the same IP address.

Likewise, I understand it is good to use keywords in the H1 title of an article or in the first paragraph, but at what point do I trigger a penalty for keyword stuffing?

Poet