Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site?s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit

A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we?ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites ( www.scottgu.com ) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I?ll cover later in this blog post:  

Search Relevancy and URL Splitting

Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site?s ?search relevancy? are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in ...

Previously getting traffic on your web site was not an easy task. You had to do a lot of link exchanging as well as social networking in order to get visitors for your web site. This is not a difficult thing now as many of the great search engine optimization software are available in the market. The best way for optimizing your web site is with the help of these softwares. Once you get to know about these tools, they would prove to be a blessing for your web site. You would not have to worry any more about getting low or no traffic on your site. These tools will allow you web site to be placed at the top of the search results of the search engines hence, in this way it can bring more of the visitors to your web site. There are more chances of having more traffic and people on your web site when the URL of your site or the web page appears on the first page of the search result. This software optimizes your web site with the help of using the proper and right keywords for your web site. seo tools free Web analytics SEO tools seo software seo optimization search engine promotion keyword generator search engine optimization software ke ...

So I was visiting with a friend last night, and he indicated that he was having a bit of a problem with his WSS 3.0 installation.  Short story is that he has a dedicated Win2k8 box acting as a web server on his domain for internal sites.  They have several web-based LOB apps that run on that box, all as virtual directories under the default web site.  Even though they are running SBS 2003 with its WSS 2.0 companyweb, they wanted to install WSS 3 to take advantage of the new wiki site template.  So, they installed WSS 3 on the web server, which immediately broke their LOB apps. So what happened? When you first install WSS 3.0 and run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard, SharePoint creates a new web application (SharePoint – 80) and creates a new web site in IIS that takes over the default site.  Dana recognized this, so within IIS he edited the bindings for the SharePoint site to use port 81, allowing him to re-enable the original default website in IIS and get his LOB apps back.  The problem?  Not only was it a pain having to enter :81 after the servername to access the site, but clicking links on the SharePoint site continued to want to use port 80, resulting in constant 404 errors. So how did we fix it? If you’re new to SharePoint, it is worth taking a little time to explain some of the architecture and terminology around SharePoint 3.0 to help put the answer in to context.  First, it is important to understand the distinction between a SharePoint web application, and an IIS web site.  SharePoint (whether WSS or MOSS) can have multiple web applications.  These are created via SharePoint Central Administration.  You can think of a SharePoint Web Application as your top-level SharePoint site – but it is distinctly different from a website in IIS.  An IIS site that is mapped to a SharePoint web application can be thought of as a gateway to access the SharePoint web application.  You can delete the site from IIS without affecting any of the content in the SharePoint application.  (Obviously you won’t be able to access the SharePoint web application without an IIS site, but none of the SharePoint web application content or configuration is stored in the IIS site).  There are several benefits to this approach – including the ability to have multiple IIS sites mapped to a single web application, with each site being bound by a different SharePoint security zone.  The distinction between the web application and the IIS site in Dana’s situation is that the original IIS site that was bound to port 80 with no host header was separate from the actual SharePoint web application, and even though that was the initial IIS site created to access the SharePoint web application, it isn’t necessary to use that IIS site. The simplest solution for Dana was to create a new IIS site that used a host header to access his SharePoint w ...