URL Routing in ASP.Net Web Forms Part - 1

Dear Friends,

With the start of development of a new project using ASP.Net Web Forms, the most important requirement of it was that the Web Portal to be developed must be SEO Friendly and thus it lead me to look for various options for the same.

Our Site can be made SEO Friendly by many ways like using friendly URLs, Div based html design and few other options. But, the most important of it was the use of friendly URLs. In the MVC architecture, this feature is inbuilt but if you need to develop the portal using ASP.Net Web Forms, you need to implement the ASP.Net Routing concept.

Few of the benefits of using URL Routing are mentioned below:

• Help in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and hence improve page hits by putting relevant keywords in the URL.
• Users are becoming more tech savvy and find directly manipulating the URL easier than inputting text boxes and clicking buttons.
• Short and easy to type URLs are good.
• URLs are persistent i.e. users do not want to rely on your page names and folder structure when application is accessed. For e.g. if a user bookmarks a page and for some reasons developer need to restructure the code files. User might not get to the same page through the same bookmark.

For Example, generally, if we need to pass parameters from one page to another using ASP.Net we will be using querystring in the URL as given below,

"products.aspx?category=mobile"

But, using the URL Routing, we need to use

"products/mobile"

Search engine does not consider any value after ".aspx" in its listing, but using URL Routing, it is now possible to keep any keywords which can be crawled by the web crawler. Moreover, every search engine gives first preference to URL while searching any keywords.

I hope you liked the article. I will be posting the exact implementation of URL routing in the Part-2 of this blog series of URL Routing.

You can give your inputs in the comments section.

Thanks,
Munjal