In the last part of my series of creating visitor and SEO friendly blogs, I just wanted to touch on some thoughts that are especially for .NET developers. GraffitiCMS is written on the .NET platform and utilizes these concepts innately. When creating blogs or public sites for the web, ASP.NET developers should pay attention to the following:

SEO Tips Specifically for ASP.NET Developers

• Postbacks are bad, mmmmkay? Many ASP.NET developers hide and show certain panels based on values retrieved via Postback. Spiders cannot crawl this content. It's beter to use those "show/hide" parameters via URL. If you want content crawled, don't make it contingent upon a Postback event. Make sure to use plain text hyperlinks wherever possible and minimize use of the button or linkButton controls.
• Use URL Rewriting to turn pages such as "mypage.aspx?param1=1&param2=2&param3=3" into "mypage/1/2/3". Google really struggles with dynamic pages. Many blogging platforms such as GraffitiCMS and Community Server support creating SEO friendly URL's out of the box.
• Make sure to modify the <Title> tag on Postbacks, and linking via URL. If the content dynamically changes, make sure to dynamically change the Title Tag as well so that search engines will note it as a different page and crawl it accordingly. The same is true for <META> tags – change them dynamically when the content of the page changes.
• Viewstate can bite you. It can cause your keywords to appear too far down in the document to provide search engine relevancy. Some experts advocate getting rid of the Viewstate altogether.
• Do not use inline CSS or Javascript – The better the relation between content text to html/css/javascript code, the better the page ranking. Keep the actual page sizes as uncluttered as possible by using external css and Javascript files.

ASP.NET 2.0 and up provide quite a bit of functionality to meet these goals. In my journey from living in the Middle Tier of Intranet based apps into public web facing apps, I've learned so much about how to do things differently. I hope to keep learning new things every day! Please leave any additional tips or feedback in the comments section of this post!

Read the first two posts in this series:

How to Create a Blog That is Both Visitor and SEO Friendly – Part One - Blog Setup

How to Create a Blog that is Both Visitor and SEO Friendly – Part Two - Blog Posts