Search Engine Optimization With Rich Media

Pete LePageSr. Product Manager, Microsofthttp://blogs.msdn.com/petel

SEO is SEO

SEO isn’t black magic HTML requires simple guidelines for best

SEO RIA’s require some special help

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SEO BASICS

Design Guidelines

Always create a Site Map Great for search engines, and helps users

Don’t put too many links on a page (>100)

Take advantage of accessibility features Set ALT attribute Set page Title

Use semantic HTML H1 for major headings (1 or 2 on a page) H2 for sub headings (a few on a page) H3..H6 for other headings

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Technical Considerations

Do not use data in the URL to track users Server should support If-Modified-Since

request Use robots.txt to specify what should and

should not be crawled Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, DHTML,

Frames and many other features can stop Spiders

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Quality Considerations

Always try to display new or original content

Don’t just syndicate data from other sites Using words/language that your users will

search for Be consistent in linking

http://www.microsoft.com/expression http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ http://www.microsoft.com/expression/default.aspx

Ask yourself, do I want to visit this site?7

Submitting Your Site

About.com http://www.altavista.com/addurl/

Google.com http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Live.Com http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Yahoo.com http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

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Avoid Black Hat SEO

Too many links on a page Hiding text or links from a user

Setting font size to zero Using same background colour as the text Setting css display property to hidden Putting large quantities of text behind an image

Serve different content to search engines than real users

Create pages with little or no original content

You May Be Removed From Search Engines For Violating These Guidelines!

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DEMO

Testing Your Site For SEO

Test your site with JavaScript turned off What will the search engine see

Turn off Images and view ALT text Are you displaying relevant info?

Use Lynx or other Text Browser What does the Spider see

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RIA SEO

Silverlight SEO

Spiders do not index Silverlight controls For best indexing, place plain HTML

content inside Silverlight <DIV> Content is replaced by Silverlight when installed

Spread content over multiple pages/controls Don’t put all content in one Silverlight control

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SILVERLIGHT SEO DEMO

ASP.NET SEO

Avoid POSTBACKs Spiders don’t click on buttons Instead use a link with a query string property

Use URL Rewriters Spiders like short query strings

Turn off ViewState ViewState can get big, and push content down

Ensure unique page titles and meta data Engines might think the pages are the same

Use the built in Site Map creator15

AJAX SEO

Show by default, use JavaScript to hide Doesn’t look or feel like black hat ASP.NET Accordion control does this

Provide links to all content Use anchors to point at content

Use URL Rewriters Spiders like short query strings

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QUESTIONS?

Pete.LePage@Microsoft.comhttp://blogs.msdn.com/petel