A website’s code is like a play that tells a story to the search engine. If you have ink blotches and pages ripped or missing from the script it is hard for the search engine to understand the plot, if the search engine misses the plot it cannot tell others about it. Using rich snippets helps explain the characters and the context in which they exist making it easier for the search engine to understand. Don’t make the script too confusing or ambiguous search engine bots are not that smart, keep it simple and to the point. Make your site easy for the search engine to read and understand, and it will tell others about it. I hope to explain a little of how Microsoft tools and technologies can help you to do just that.
I am a developer, I am not much of a link builder or marketer and social media is still a bit of a blur to me, given this I like to give myself a head start by creating a technically sound website to make sure any link building and marketing is taken full advantage of. It is my belief that you don’t need as much link building if you get everything else right. I use the analogy of a man fishing with holes in his fishing net; he needs to do a lot more fishing than a man whose net is free from holes. OK someone has already pointed out that fishing nets by nature have holes, but I think you know what I mean.
There have been a few articles on Microsoft technologies and SEO of late and I have tried not to double up. I will confess I am pro Microsoft, a Microsoft Partner and a Microsoft WebsiteSpark WebPro and have been involved in many Microsoft programs over the years and some say I am a little bias. The truth is I started web development the moment the internet came to Australia and used and tried many different technologies at university and in private enterprise before becoming pro Microsoft, it was a conclusion born of experience not blind faith that led me here.
.net
For those that are not interested in development, I will not dwell too long.
Recently there was an SEOMoz blog article pointing out some of the pitfalls of ASP.NET WebForms and SEO, most of these problems have been sorted out in the versions leading up to .net 4.0. Some SEO problems like view-state and lack of control of the HTML rendered to the page are inherent of the drag and drop controls that are used in WebForms, something that was designed before SEO really became the industry it is today.
ASP.MVC
ASP.MVC is a new platform that moves away from the Webforms approach and allows you to get closer to the metal; MVC is a pattern Model View Controller that gives a clean separation of concerns and gives full control back to the developer. MVC has created an excitement among .net developers that has been quite obvious and personally has restored my love of programming. The ASP.MVC routing engine gives full control over URL’s free from the physical folder structure. Scaffolding in MVC allows for rapid development without taking control away from the developer. ASP.MVC gives control over SEO friendly code and performance that just cannot be delivered by CMS or older platforms.
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A separation of concerns.
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Boring Explanation.
- MVC separates application flow, business logic from content and content from presentation.
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What that means in the context of SEO?
- It means clean code. No more view state, or messy code from server controls, just plain old html that’s easy for bots to read.
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Boring Explanation.
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ASP.MVC routing engine.
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Boring Explanation.
- MVC routing engine maps URL’s to the relevant action method in the relevant controller.
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What that means in the context of SEO?
- It means that your URL does not have a filename, no index.html or default.aspx, the URL is not reliant on a folder structure. Your URL can say anything it wants no matter what the physical path to your content is, you can call it, /my-really-good keyword/and-another-really-good-keyword/whatever without the use of url-rewriting.
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Boring Explanation.
I recommend anyone getting into SEO friendly web development today to look into ASP.MVC. Since I first tried MVC I could not imagine myself using anything else, but MVC needs a deep understanding of programming and therefore for some it’s just not an option.
I am not condemning CMS websites, just that there are tradeoffs. If you are promoting your own site and you are not a programmer then you would be better of writing content and gaining links than spending a year or so getting up to speed with web development, but if you do have a development background then I would be using it to advantage.
Visual Studio
Visual studio is the editor for Microsoft Technologies that makes it possible to build complex large applications. While it is possible to build .net applications without Visual Studio, commercially in my opinion it is not really practical.
IntelliSense and SEO
In 1996 Microsoft introduced IntelliSense a feature that allows for faster programming and a reduction in errors. Since then IntelliSense has evolved to incorporate all syntaxes needed to create a website, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, server side languages like VB and C# and now HTML5 and Microdata (Rich snippets) this is just great for producing SEO friendly semantic mark-up. Those that have moved down the rich snippets track would know just how time consuming it can be marking up entities thought-out a website, IntelliSense in Visual Studio makes that job so much easier. IntelliSense for HTML5 and Microdata is an add-in for Visual Studio 2010 and is built-in to the new Visual Studio Developer preview.
Code analysis
Visual studio will pick up the majority of errors you can make in web development, from server side code to HTML and CSS, you can tell Visual Studio what version of a technology you are using such as HTML5 or CSS3 and it will tell you if your code conforms to the specifications. With Microsoft FxCop you can run and identify not only errors but best practise issues, performances issues and standards such as CLR compliance in your project to ensure it runs to its optimum. This is a great way to learn how to write scalable efficient compliant applications. Search Engines like clean coded, standards compliant applications that perform fast and reliably. Crawlability is often an underlying problem with many sites and can lead to wasted efforts in trying to get a page to rank.
Anybody that has anything to do with machine learning, robotics or computing will know how something so simple and straight forward to a human can mean something so different to a machine. Even the most simple HTML error can change the story of your script, and inject ambiguity, as a result your efforts in marketing your site are now missing the point. Visual Studio makes it hard for such errors to get by without notice.
I could write a book about Visual Studio and all its benefits and features these are just a few that make creating clean coded semantic HTML websites that much easier.
Internet Information Server
Known to most as simply IIS, Internet Information Server is the Microsoft Web Server that really makes the basic tasks involved with hosting SEO friendly websites easy.
There is no other company where you can build a website using tools, database, server, web server, programming languages and even the browser to view it in made by the same company. Visual Studio for instance works with IIS to enable you to publish your site with the click of a button, it can even publish your database, transform your web.config file from settings on your test machine to those needed for the server all with one click.
Authentication
No messy htaccess, setting up your websites authentication is done though a simple to use interface, simply set up roles, setup new users and add then to a role.
Set up your access areas by assigning roles to folders, you can micro manage your authentication in your code if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, but for most applications it’s just point and click.
Redirects
Now you poor folks using a apache and struggling with the htaccess file take note. Let’s say we want to setup a redirect to redirect from www to non www or visa-versa. Here is how it is done one IIS. Just select the domain you want to use from the list, and alls done.
Here is a the resulting code in your web.config file.
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Now was that easy?
There are many pre written rules giving the basic redirect and url-rewriting needs for a SEO friendly website plus the ability to write your own more complex rules.
Url-Rewiting
Now we all know the story of ugly parameters in URL’s. You can write a complex regular expression in your htaccess to enable you to use friendly URL’s, but how many bother or know that when doing url-rewrites you need to write a corresponding 301-redirect so as to avoid duplicate content, then you have the problem of changing every unfriendly URL in the site to the new friendly URL’s or you can write an out-going rewrite rule to rewrite all the old URL’s on request. I am pretty good with my regular expressions, but I don’t care how good you are it’s a lot of bother and testing to get all that working, and be careful you don’t send your requests off in a loop of rewrite redirect, rewrite redirect, as often happens.
Let’s now look at how you do this with IIS, simply paste your ugly URL into the box, and pick a pretty one. Select corresponding redirect rule, and corresponding outgoing url-rewrite rule and all is done. You can now accept friendly URL’s; you have 301-redirect in place in case anyone uses the old ugly URL’s and you have a out-going url-rewrite rule to turn all your internal URL’s into nice new friendly URL’s in the browser on request.
I have some IIS SEO tutorials and more to come for those that are interested further.
The SEO Toolkit
I am not the first to write about the SEO-Toolkit that can be installed on IIS so I will not spend long on it. I will try to show a few more things than just the list of violations it finds. By the way I have scanned many sites including high charging SEO websites and I have never found one that comes close to getting a perfect score, most sites have violations in the thousands. I am not saying that I am the only one to get my sites violations free, but I am yet to find any, Alessandro Catorcini Lead Program Manager of the Bing API said the same to Rand on White Board Friday, it shows you how much of a head start you can gain from getting the technical side of SEO right.
Remember that these violations found by the SEO Toolkit are the very same ones found by BingBot. “exactly the same as the crawler of the search engine will see it” Alessandro Catorcini, Lead Program Manager, Bing API
Crawl
Here i have crawled a small part of wordpress.com root domain and look at the violations. Many of the biggest sites on the internet could benefit from the SEO Toolkit.
Reports
You can click on any URL anywhere and get a huge array of information about that page.
There are a lot of set reports you can analyse and export.
You can even make your own reports using a huge array of variables, you can group by, and aggregate, cross reference and then export to a csv file that you can open in any spreadsheet program including of course Microsoft Excel.
Sitemaps and Robots.txt
There is a great sitemap creator that allows you to just point and click and your pages are added with the last modified times. There is also a robots text creator with the same interface where you just point and click.
Bing Webmaster Tools
I spoke earlier about how you can build a SEO friendly website using only Microsoft products from beginning to end, well guess what, we even have our own search engine Microsoft Bing, comes complete with Webmaster tools and our own version of Matt Cutts, Duane Forrester 2.0. Bing is a great search engine that has raised the bar in search, and BWMT has some features that Duane has blogged about and spoken about on White Board Friday and I don’t really want to double up on, but there are 3 features I really like.
Inbound Links
I love the way you can see a time line in a Microsoft Silverlight chart, it shows you all your linked pages with link count and when you click on them it opens up to show you all the pages linking to it with link text all in the one place.
URL Submission
Here you can enter URL’s directly into the index and as and bypass all normal processes. Bing will test your page it may not last in the index as Bing have made it clear they don’t want every page in the index. But if you have a page that you think should be in there you can get a fair run and depending on user behaviour it will either stay or get booted out. As you can see you get to enter 10 a day and up to 50 a month. http://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-and-bing-webmaster-tools-with-duane-forrester/
Index Explorer
The index explorer gives you a chance to look directly into the Bing index the same way Bing engineers do, albeit filtered to your own site. By simply clicking on a link you can see all the relevant info about your URL’s.
Conclusion. Without leaving windows, and before you start to promote your site, you have a clean code website, well segmented with HTML5, clearly defined entities in your rich snippets, SEO friendly URL’s, a site free from violations, your code optimized, your redirects and url-rewriting and authentication done simply by using a point and click interface, a wide range of reports on any aspect of your site, your site published with a click, sitemaps and robots.txt generated and your URL’s placed directly into Bing’s index. With all these easy to use features and generous tools provide by Microsoft, you have every chance of getting perfect technical SEO on your site.
OK I know that some of you are comfortable with WordPress or programming in PHP, well guess what, with a few clicks you can install PHP and WordPress or most other CMS systems on IIS using the Web Platform Installer build into IIS. You can even try out the new Microsoft funded open source CMS, The Orchard Project. Simply click add, you will be asked for a few basic settings like user name and password and your site will be set up ready to use.
After you set up your blog, you can edit It remotely using Microsoft Live Writer or Word for Windows.
I think Microsoft has done a good job of providing powerful software that can be used by the novice also. I have showcased only a small set of features available, there are many more goodies I would love to show you if I had the time. Optimally you would want to run all this on a windows server, but you can run all these things on your PC with Windows 7 professional of even XP professional. There is free version of Visual Studio and SQL Server, and IIS is free with windows professional.
There are some in this cynical world that don’t give Microsoft credit where credit is due. Many criticisms seem to be based more on ideology that fact. I think the guys at Microsoft deserve more credit than many are willing to give. I would like to thank them all for making my life easier. Scott Guthrie and the guys in the .net team for all the .net stuff and especially for MVC, the guys who brought us Visual Studio, Duane Forrester, Alessandro Catorcini and the others at Bing and IIS for the SEO Toolkit, BWMT and Bing itself. The guys at the WebsiteSpark program for all the free software and of course Bill Gates who without, computing would not be what it is today.
