2. Search Engine Optimization With Rich Media Pete LePage Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft http://blogs.msdn.com/petel

3. SEO is SEO  SEO isn’t black magic  HTML requires simple guidelines for best SEO  RIA’s require some special help 3

4. SEO BASICS 4

5. 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 5

6. 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 6

7. 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/ http://www.microsoft.com/expression/  http://www.microsoft.com/expression/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/expression/default.aspx  Ask yourself, do I want to visit this site? 7

8. 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 8

9. 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! 9

10. DEMO 10

11. 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 11

12. RIA SEO 12

13. Silverlight SEO  Spiders 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 13

14. SILVERLIGHT SEO DEMO 14

15. 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 creator 15

16. 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 16

17. QUESTIONS? Pete.LePage@Microsoft.com http://blogs.msdn.com/petel 17