Page Meta Keyword & Description – Search Engine Optimization feature

Upto Visual Studio 2008, one can set the Title of the page declaratively or through program using Page.Title. However, as more and more web traffic is happening through search engines, Page’s Title, Keyword and description become more important. Although the Keyword feature was exploited and hence many search engines today ignore it, Page Description is something still major search engines such as Google, Bing use for identifying and indexing pages based on content.

The new feature in ASP.NET 4.0 allows users to programmatically set the Page Description and Keywords as follows:-

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.Page.Title = "My ASP.NET Blog";
this.Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET, Web Development, Blog, ASP.NET Blog";
this.Page.MetaDescription = "This Blog contains posts related to ASP.NET and Web Development";
}

The above code appends the following markup

<meta name="keywords" content="ASP.NET, Web Development, Blog, ASP.NET Blog" /> <meta name="description" content="This Blog contains posts related to ASP.NET and Web Development" />

And the way it works is that, if the meta tags are already present in the HTML markup, whatever is set in the code behind will fill up the “content” part alone if the “name” tag is matching.

Although this looks simple, it is very useful in cases where you want to set these dynamically based on a condition / criteria. So far, these were set statically in the HTML. Now with Page Class level access, these can be set dynamically.

There are many more enhancements to Webforms such as Routing improvements, setting ClientID etc., which we will examine in the future posts.