Hi,

I noticed some threads about my site www.skistyle.be and the fact that I replaced the menu control by custom divs :)

SEO is actually very important in designing websites. MS still provides table oriented controls that are not that good for SEO sites.
MS now released the CSS Control adaptors that could make a difference. I am going to take a look at this in the next weeks, to see how I can integrete them in my site. These adaptors generate divs in stead of tables. They will probably be included in the Orcas release or in .Net 3.5.
So I hope I can reactivate the breadcrumbs.
(BTW : plb -> I'm from Belgium, not the Netherlands :) But I am crazy about skiing :)

Another thing I'm looking into is to change the meta information. When using dynamic pages, it might be interesting to change the meta information dynamically. This is an issue when using masterpages and postbacks.

And of course friendly urls. I played around with them but, when you enter a comment it fails. I hope marco can say something about this.

to Rocco50 => I totally agree on the asp.net forums issue. Same goes for codeplex where there seems to be no activity at all.

If anyone has any good SEO tips, please add them to this thread

koen
www.skistyle.be

If you use specific words inside <h1> tags... it will help search engines to find your page

Thanks for the ideas, Koen. I was skiing two days ago, but where I am there aren't too many nice mountains that are close :)

What kind of benefits do you think changing the meta tags dynamically will provide?

Lets try to find the email addresses of the asp.net admins and ask for our forum.

One of the advantages in my case would be to add the domain name to the list of meta keywords.

While a little bit premature, you may want to look into preordering this title:

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyT...470131470.html

The book has alot of helpful tips and tricks in regards to SEO. In the meantime, you may want to checkout www.seoegghead.com which is a fairly diverse resource when it comes to SEO.

hth.


================================================== =========
Read this if you want to know how to get a correct reply for your question:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
^^Took that from planoie's profile^^
^^Modified text taken from gbianchi profile^^
================================================== =========
Technical Editor for: Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyT...470131470.html

Discussion:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=56429

thanks for the tip. I will pre-order that one !

koen

Sorry again. I started calling you German. Then Dutch. I am converging slowly on Belgium. I don't know much about Belgium except for Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jose Van Dam. Is everyone there named Van Dam?

There is an official Microsoft SEO tips website:
http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm?

I haven't optimized my own site(s) yet but I see problems. First of all, all the advice you get on SEO is stated as an absolute. Nothing is quantified. For example if you adopt practice X how much better is your search engine visibility. If your menu changes only increased your SEO cross-section by 3% it might not be worth it. If it gave you a 30% increase that would be different.

I use the term cross-secton as an analogy to stealth aircraft design. The radar signature of an aircraft is measured in square feet (or meters). We need something similar in SEO as we attempt to avoid creating a stealth site.

Another problem is that all database driven aspx sites are sub-optimum according to Microsoft. The spiders can't navigate through a URL that uses something like - /BrowseArticles.aspx?CatID=28. A spider wants a simple text link. This would seem to mean that TheBeerHouse sites and indeed almost all NET sites are SEO unfriendly.

My own menu solution is again like the architecture of my whole site, a bit messy. I wanted a drop down menu so that first time visitors can quickly see the scope of the site services. I added a rotator for the same purpose.

The Beer House design has a single level menu with text-ornamentations for the roll-overs. Clicking a menu item takes you to a page where there are text hyper links in the body of the text. IMHO this is a crude menu design. The menu could present sub menus on the main (default) page or it could present sub-menus on each detail page. As it is now to see what kind of articles are posted you have to open up the Articles page.

I wanted better graphics and multiple levels. I tried using the RadMenu control against the web.sitemap XML file but the web.sitemap has a single root and I got not a line of choices but a tree descending from a single node. I also lost the breadcrumbs functionality and the conditional visibility of the Admin menu choice.

My current solution is to replace the MS NET menu at the top with a RadMenu and leave the MS NET menu at the bottom.

I may have better SEO results with my dual menu solution. There are now two paths for the spiders to try. But how would I know?

http://weboperahouse.com

Hi plb,

I actually don't know any other van dam people in belgium :)

Regarding seo , I think every 3% is worth the effort :). The fact that sites have database driven urls ?id=5 is not a MS issue I think. It's an issue for every database driven site.
I once solved it by writing an http handler which converts a folder : www.skistyle.be/areas/tignes.aspx into www.skistyle.be/showarea?id=3 (the handler checked for the path, then it checked for the location in the database : select ID from areas where name = "tignes" and converted into id=3.

The problem here is that when submitting information (feedback, ratings,....) I got some server issues (not knowing the refering ID, I guess). So I skipped that for now, but that should be possible.

you are correct about the menu design. It's very poor.
I have the same feeling about the forum. I prefer an overview like asp.net forum has (all categories summarizes on 1 page)

I hope we can see some other solutions here (on on asp.net forum) very soon.

koen

any further advances/thoughts on this SEO area?? I've just recently started thinking about this and was going to test drive the http://www.seo-informer.com addin. also, i wonder how much more 'visibility' a site has once it's registered for adsense (or is that being cynical!!) :)

nayway - nice to hear an update on this topic if there has been any.

jimi

http://www.jamestollan.com

Hi,

adsens is definitly worth the investment. We use adsens to, and when monitoring it well, it really can increase your traffice.
Seo informer looks cool. I'm looking forward to reading your experiences with this tool.
At this moment I've found something to solve the url forwarding issue above, but I still need to implement it.

I just read in a book (SEO an hour a day) that meta tags are becoming less important. Don't know if this is actually true.
I'm also working on the tagging solution since that creates automatically some insite links, which might improve ranking :)

koen