Search Engine Optimization With Rich Media Pete LePage Microsoft

SEO is SEO  SEO isn’t black magic  Rich media or not, it is still search engine optimization 3

SEO Basics  Design Considerations  Technical Considerations  Quality Considerations  Submit Your Site 4

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 (3 or 4 on a page)  H3..H6 for other headings 5

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 crawlers 6

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

Submitting Your Site  About.com   Google.com   Live.Com   Yahoo.com  8

Avoid Black Hat SEO  Putting 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  Using key words on a page that are the same colour as the background  Serve different content to search engines than real users  Create pages with little or no original content 9

Silverlight SEO  Crawlers do not index Silverlight controls  For best indexing, place plain HTML content inside Silverlight  Content is replaced by Silverlight when installed  Spread content over multiple pages/controls  Don’t put all content in one Silverlight control 10

Silverlight SEO Demo 11

ASP.NET SEO  Avoid POSTBACKs  Crawlers don’t click on buttons  Instead use a link with a query string property  Use URL Rewriters  Crawlers 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 12