Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO (Wrox Professional Guides) [Paperback]

Cristian Darie (Author), Jaimie Sirovich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0470131470 | ISBN-13: 978-0470131473 | Edition: 1

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only the job of the marketing department. It must be considered from a web site's inception and throughout its lifetime by you, the web site developer. Making changes to the architecture of a web site and modifying presentation techniques can dramatically increase search engine rankings and traffic levels.

Written for the ASP.NET developer or tech-savvy marketer, this unique reference provides techniques for creating and maintaining web sites optimized for search engines. You'll discover how to facilitate the indexing of your site, as well as how to leverage specific technologies and services for site promotion. You will understand the role of web site architecture in search engine optimization and explore various topics therein. Knowing this will help you to develop a site that achieves great search engine rankings.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand the criteria that influence search engine rankings

• Create keyword-rich URLs using ASP.NET, ISAPI_Rewrite, and UrlRewriter.NET

• Use HTTP Headers to properly indicate the status of web documents

• Create optimized content and cope with duplicate content effectively

• Avoid being the victim of black hat SEO techniques

• Understand and implement geo-targeting and cloaking

• Use site maps effectively—for users as well as search engines

• SEO enhancements that can easily be applied to an existing web site

• Build a search engine–friendly e-commerce catalog

Who this book is for

This book is for ASP.NET developers who need to incorporate search engine optimization principles into their web applications, as well as marketers who want to gain a better understanding of the technologies involved in search engine marketing.

Enhance Your Knowledge
Advance Your Career

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only the job of the marketing department. It must be considered from a web site's inception and throughout its lifetime by you, the web site developer. Making changes to the architecture of a web site and modifying presentation techniques can dramatically increase search engine rankings and traffic levels.

Written for the ASP.NET developer or tech-savvy marketer, this unique reference provides techniques for creating and maintaining web sites optimized for search engines. You'll discover how to facilitate the indexing of your site, as well as how to leverage specific technologies and services for site promotion. You will understand the role of web site architecture in search engine optimization and explore various topics therein. Knowing this will help you to develop a site that achieves great search engine rankings.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand the criteria that influence search engine rankings

• Create keyword-rich URLs using ASP.NET, ISAPI_Rewrite, and UrlRewriter.NET

• Use HTTP Headers to properly indicate the status of web documents

• Create optimized content and cope with duplicate content effectively

• Avoid being the victim of black hat SEO techniques

• Understand and implement geo-targeting and cloaking

• Use site maps effectively—for users as well as search engines

• SEO enhancements that can easily be applied to an existing web site

• Build a search engine–friendly e-commerce catalog

Who this book is for

This book is for ASP.NET developers who need to incorporate search engine optimization principles into their web applications, as well as marketers who want to gain a better understanding of the technologies involved in search engine marketing.

Enhance Your Knowledge
Advance Your Career

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP, SQL, and related areas. Cristian currently lives in Bucharest, Romania, studying distributed application architectures for his PhD. He’s getting involved with various commercial and research projects, and when not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say “Hi,” you can reach Cristian through his personal web site at http://www.cristiandarie.ro.

Jaimie Sirovich is a search engine marketing consultant. He works with his clients to build them powerful online presences. Officially Jaimie is a computer programmer, but he claims to enjoy marketing much more. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a BS in Computer Science. He worked under Barry Schwartz at RustyBrick, Inc., as lead programmer on all eCommerce projects until 2005. At present, Jaimie consults for several organizations and administrates the popular search engine marketing blog, SEOEgghead.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 410 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (August 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470131470
• ISBN-13: 978-0470131473
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #55 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Database Design

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for Microsoft .NET developers who develop commercial websites,, February 17, 2008

By 

Carsten Cumbrowski "Carsten aka Roy/SAC & Cir... (Fresno, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

Most websites are developed without SEO in mind. They are often developed by teams that have a very deep knowledge and understanding about programming websites and applications, databases and also general business and e-commerce. A large (if not the most) number of those teams only have little or no knowledge of SEO at all. The result is a website that might violates some of the very basic rules of creating a site that is well accessible and understandable for the human visitors as well as the non-human visitors (the search engine spiders or crawlers).

Changing a site after it is live and around for a while, when somebody realizes that search engine traffic is not the way it should be, can be very costly and in the worst cases may be even require an almost entire rewrite of the website code.

That's why is it important that not only marketers are being educated about the benefits and principles of search engine optimization, but the people that build websites as well. Who builds websites? Web developers. This book was written exactly for this audience, but also a SEO who knows most of the information to SEO provided in the book could benefit from this book. It includes a lot of very practical .NET sample source code for ready to use tools that can help marketers in their daily routine.

Although a lot of the content is not .NET specific are other parts that are using a lot of sample source code to demonstrate possible solutions, specific for Microsoft IIS and the .NET Framework. If you are a PHP developer, check out the sister book of this one (Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO), which is geared towards PHP, Apache Webserver and MySQL web developers.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Reference for ASP.net Pros, February 17, 2008

By 

C. Nirmal ".net Dude" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

Good:
1) Definitive guide with Step by Step instructions.
2) All the latest topics covered well.
3) Covers basics of SEO as well as Advanced Tutorials to implementing SEO in ASP.net

Bad:
1) Too many references and Links to websites. (its can be good as well as bad). Many people may not like reading the book and having to look at the websites referenced at the same time.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting book on SEO, July 23, 2008

By 

Luis Abreu (Funchal, Madeira Portugal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO (Wrox Professional Guides) (Paperback)

[...]
Ok, so this is the second book I've got from Wrox for reviewing (and yes, I did enjoy it much more than the first). SEO is one of those things that most developers end up forgetting when building ASP.NET pages Unfortunately, that might cost you a lot. This books presents several principles and ideas that will help you improve your site's indexing. The structure is clean and the content is good.

Now, the bad things: I didn't really liked the C# code style presented throughout the book and I think that some of the ideas were "duplicated" in several chapters. The text gives lots of emphasis on Google (which one can understand, since it rules the search engine market). I'm not against it but I'd like to see more about the other search engines too. Overall, I'm going to give it a 7.5/10.