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Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET Review

Posted on Wed Apr 23, 2008 by Tom Kraak
In: DotNetNuke, SEO, Reviews | 14 Comments

Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO The DNN module developers and web application programmers that I work with can usually be categorized as follows: SEO unaware, SEO aware, and SEO proficient. Unfortunately and traditionally, the vast majority of them fall into the first two categories, meaning it either never or only rarely crosses their minds that their multi-page modules will be scrutinized by Google and company just like any other web page.

Now Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO by Cristian Darie and Jaimie Sirovich aims to change all that. This is the first book on search engine optimization that I’ve come across that “delves at all into the meaty technical details” of SEO and therefore speaks to developers as opposed to only marketers. But then again, SEO is a team effort and I believe tech-minded marketers will appreciate the book as well even without the need to fully grasp every code snippet or regular expression. The exposure to the technical side of SEO helps me as a marketer to effectively communicate with technical folks. Sounds like a “win win” for everyone.

The book starts off with “a primer in basic SEO” for web developers and touches on fundamental concepts such as link equity, Google Page Rank, usability and accessibility. The introduction also looks at search engine ranking factors and distinguishes between visible on-page factors, invisible on-page factors, time-based factors, and external or off-page factors. Search engine penalties such as Google’s supplemental index and duplicate content are also discussed. The intro closes with a listing of resources and tools including web analytics, market research, browser plugins as well as SEO forums and blogs. Concise and to the point – pretty much all developers need to know to start their journey into the uncharted waters of SEO.

Then the book spends 2 chapters on a favorite topic of mine: search engine-friendly URLs and content relocation, also known as 301 and 302 redirection. If you have full control over your web server, you will appreciate the numerous code samples for ISAPI_Rewrite. If you are “stuck” on a shared hosting environment without access to ISAPI filters, the coverage of URL rewriting with UrlRewriter.NET comes to the rescue. The main lesson that I’ve learned from these 2 chapters though is that no matter what method you deploy for URL rewriting, you won’t go very far without at least basic knowledge of regular expressions. No need to worry though as the book does a nice job of “regex hand-holding” whenever applicable and even provides an appendix teaching simple regular expressions. For seasoned ASP.NET developers this won’t be an issue anyway as regular expression are commonly used for string matching and parsing chores besides URL rewriting.

Next up is fairly detailed discussion of duplicate content, which is a common dilemma for database-driven web applications such as DotNetNuke. The authors touch on causes and effects of duplicate content and discuss utilizing the robots meta tag as well as robots.txt pattern exclusion. More interestingly, a code sample and walkthrough is provided for generating robots.txt files programmatically. That way, for instance, all DNN printer-friendly pages could be disallowed “automatically” and on-the-fly!

The remainder of the book devotes chapters to search engine-friendly HTML and JavaScript, web feeds and social bookmarking, sitemaps, link bait, and foreign language SEO among others. A basic case study on “building an e-commerce store” summarizes the main concepts covered in the book and offers a feel for how these SEO-related principles may be applied in the real world.

Without going into further detail, I wholeheartly recommend the book to any ASP.NET programmer and selfishly to any DotNetNuke module developer. I do realize that the more technically folks may never look at SEO as religiously as I do, but that’s not the point. The ultimate goal in my mind is to unite our efforts behind building websites and web applications that perform on the server as well as on the client.

Oh, and in the unlikely event that you are a PHP developer reading a DNN blog, the same author team also published a PHP version of the book.

I have a number of DNN developers on my “blog to email” list and I’d love to get their input. Do you consider SEO at all during module development? If so, what challenges do you face by doing so?

Comments

Monday, April 28, 2008 at 7:56 PM Bruce Chapman says:

Tom,

I hadn't seen that book advertised (I must rely on Amazon recomendations too much), but I'll probably take a look.

To answer your question, these days I design all my modules from an SEO point of view. Everything else flows from this. The one I'm currenlty working on has pages of code dedicated to giving the administrator full control over the information that is contained in the Url, page title, meta tags and link text. The module shuns the use of postbacks, html tables, Ajax, javascript and a lot of other favourite short-cut technologies, in order to present the cleanest, most seo-friendly Html possible.

It has taken me about 3 times longer to write because of this flexibility, but, when it's done, I know I'll be able to use it exactly the way I want. Search engine results are the oxygen that most websites breathe, so you've got to give modules the biggest lungs you can :)

Incidentally, I took your advice and registered some topics in the 'open force 08 call for speakers'. One of the topics I chose was 'Developing Search Engine Optimised DotNetNuke modules'.

Monday, April 28, 2008 at 9:25 PM Tom Kraak says:

Thanks for chiming in Bruce.

You are certainly at the forefront of SEO-driven module development and I hope we get a chance to at least raise some SEO awareness at OpenForce 2008.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 10:28 AM Mitchel Sellers says:

I too have never seen this book listed before, but I can say that I just bought a copy of it today...

I'm a developer that most likely falls into the middle area in the list of developer skills and I'm always looking for ways of improving my abilities, especially in this area.

As Bruce mentioned above I too have started to move away from AJAX methods, and do more items that promote unique content and don't need JS to run correctly, but I find that as a custom module developer there are times that those extra flashy bells are pieces of functionality that customers "must have". It isn't an easy task to talk to a marketing person and explain to them that the really fancy, ajax, js, etc design that they think up will not work well from an SEO perspective.

Overall I hope that at OpenForce we can start to get some SEO minded topics as I think they will be of great benefit. I know I submitted a session regarding methods to build modules without reliance on postback, for example with paging and other controls of that nature.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 5:57 PM Chad Nash says:

Great post and I am ordering a copy of the book today. SEO is one of those topics that is probably the most important for any website owner. I can't tell you how many clients I have to remind that 'just because you build it, doesn't mean they come' and that getting quality web traffic isn't built in a day. I honestly do think the core team has done a good job with SEO in the past and I am sure its always on their outlook ahead. Yes, I know that most search engines don't look at the meta tags for description and keywords but then I wonder if thats the case why searching 'DAta Springs' brings up the description used in that tag? : ) The core team also implemented friendly URL's, of course there are room for enhancements but it was a great feature request. My other thoughts on SEO are that even with the right tools, modules, and gizmos, it often still takes the time of a web site administrator or content administrator to implement. It takes always making sure to use proper titles on your pages that are SEO friendly, always adding the keywords and description on pages even when you don't think they matter, always entering search terms when editing the text/html modules to aid in generating proper search results within the own site. All of these are helpful for SEO, not mention link sharing between partners and resources, and building quality content within the site.

My last comments on this are that hopefully we will begin to see more SEO friendly modules down the road... We recently introduced Google Grabber which is a nice SEO module highlighting (and adding key words to a page when those keywords found the current page) and Dynamic Tags (a search cloud module for DNN... the biggest issue with this module is that it currently only supports text/html moduels within DNN. Future versions will also parse content from blogs, forums, and so forth)... always room for growth though!

Thanks,

Chad
www.datasprings.com

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 7:17 PM Tom Kraak says:

Thanks guys. Your comments encourage me to believe that we are on the right track with building more SEO friendly DNN solutions.

Chad - only the page title tag bears considerable weight on SE ranking.

Think of the description meta tag more along the lines of ad copy. Once your pages rank, you want to entice people to "click thru" by having unique and well formed page descriptions, but descriptions and keywords will no longer help you rank ... at least with Google.

Oh, and I should have gotten an Amazon or Bookpool affiliate account for this post :)-

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 7:43 PM Bruce Chapman says:

"Oh, and I should have gotten an Amazon or Bookpool affiliate account for this post :)-"

You didn't!? Well I'd get a-clicking while you still can! Surely plenty of people will google their way onto the page yet.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 9:02 PM Tom Kraak says:

Yeah, it's already #2 if you google the exact blog post title!

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 9:09 PM Tom Kraak says:

Btw, does the DNN core provide a method to populate the meta description tag programmatically on non-conventional DNN pages?

Ideally I would like to specify a description per blog post instead of defaulting to the description of the Blog page.

Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 7:31 AM Frank Wang says:

"Btw, does the DNN core provide a method to populate the meta description tag programmatically on non-conventional DNN pages?"

Yes, it does. It's defined as Description in CDefault.

Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 7:39 AM Frank Wang says:

Our DNN eCommerce module supports meta title and meta description per product and category. It also renders product name and category name as the first

tag. It doesn't support human friendly url at the moment. We do plan to add this feature in the very near future.

Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 10:13 AM Tom Kraak says:

Thanks for you comments Frank.

As part of the beta testing for the 2.0 release of AliCommerce, I plan to pay close attention to features in support of SEO as it is essential in any ecommerce implementation.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 2:51 AM Frank Wang says:

Just a quick update. Human friendly url support has been done and the next version will be released in a few weeks.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 3:00 AM Tom Kraak says:

That's what I like to hear! Is it part of the latest beta?

Thanks for the update Frank.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 8:18 AM Frank Wang says:

it will be in beta 2, which will be released within 4 weeks.