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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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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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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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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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?
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