How to Improve Search Engine Ranking or SEO of an ASP.NET Page

Search Engine Optimization in ASP.Net

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN only read the first X bytes of text when spidering your page. Move the ViewState block to the bottom of your form to improve your chances of having the real content and keywords of your ASP.Net page indexed and ranked. This article provides the code that you can drop into your base page class to implement this functionality.

Things You'll Need

• Visual Studio .Net 2003 or
• Visual Studio .Net 2005
• A base class your ASP.NET pages will inherit from
• Some Visual Basic (VB) code

Instructions

1. 

   Create a base class for your ASP.NET application. All of your WebForms should inherit from this base class. In this example the class is name BasePage.

2. 

   In each ASP.Net WebForm change the line that reads Inherits System.Web.UI.Page to Inherits BasePage.

3. 

   Override the base Render method by adding a subroutine to the BasePage class. This method will do the work of moving the ViewState to the bottom of the page. The function should contain the following code:

   Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter)
   'Declare a StringWriter object
   Dim stringWriter As System.IO.StringWriter = New System.IO.StringWriter

   'Declare a HtmlTextWriter object
   Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)

   'Call the default render functionality of ASP.Net to the HtmlWriter object
   MyBase.Render(htmlWriter)

   'Get the page output as a HTML string
   Dim html As String = stringWriter.ToString()

   'Find the position in the HTML string of the start of the ViewState block
   Dim StartPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("<input type=""hidden"" name=""__VIEWSTATE""")

   'If the ViewState exists, move it
   If StartPoint >= 0 Then 'does __VIEWSTATE exist?

   'Find the postion of the end of the ViewState block
   Dim EndPoint As Integer = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2

   'Put the ViewState block into a string
   Dim ViewStateInput As String = html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)

   'Remove the ViewState block from the page's HTML
   html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint)

   'Find the end tag for the WebForm
   Dim FormEndStart As Integer = html.IndexOf("</form>")

   'Insert the ViewState block back into the page's HTML just before the end tag
   If FormEndStart >= 0 Then
   html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, ViewStateInput)
   End If
   End If

   'Output the modified HTML
   writer.Write(html)
   End Sub

Tips & Warnings

• The code in this article applies if you are using Visual Studio 2003 or 2005

Resources

• VS2008 Information