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Usually we create separate controllers or WCF service layer to deal with API part of the website but I will show you how you can create both RESTful website and API using the same controller code working over the exact same URL that a browser can use to browse through the website and a client applic

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving a website's position in search engines' results using unpaid techniques. The driver behind SEO is that a better (higher) position in the search results will, most likely, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website's visibility, audience, and profit. A previous article here on 4Guys, Search Engine Optimization Enhancements in ASP.NET 4, explored some of ASP.NET 4's new features designed to aid with SEO. Another helpful tool for SEO is Microsoft's SEO Toolkit, a free IIS add-on that you can run from your computer to inspect a local or remote website and identify potential issues that may impact its search engine rankings.

Using Microsoft's SEO Toolkit is simple. Once installed, run it and specify the website you want to analyze. The SEO Toolkit can analyze both local websites or remote ones. After you've specified the URL of the website to analyze, the SEO Toolkit will crawl the site, exploring its pages and identify potential issues that may affect the site's search engine rankings and offer suggestions on how to fix them. This article walks through getting started with the SEO Toolkit, showing how to use it and how to analyze its results and implement its suggestions to help improve your website's search engine placement.

A self-diagnostics page, that runs through your web.config and confirms all the settings are correct, is a quick and easy way to identify environment problems after configuration change or production deployment.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving a website's position in search engines' results using unpaid techniques. A better (higher) position in the search results will, in theory, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website's visibility and audience. There are a number of simple steps you can take on your website to improve your search engine ranking. A good first step is to download and run Microsoft's free Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Point it at a remote website and the SEO Toolkit will crawl the links on the site and identify potential problems and offer suggestions on how to fix them.

ASP.NET 4 includes a handful of new methods, properties, and libraries to assist with search engine optimization, including ASP.NET Routing, permanent redirects, and the ability to programmatically specify values for certain <meta> tags. This article examines these enhancements and shows how they can be used for SEO purposes.

Chances are, there are several different URLs that point to the same content on your website. For example, the URLs http://yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, http://www.yoursite.com, or http://www.yoursite.com/default.aspx are all likely valid URLs that results in the same content, namely the homepage for yoursite.com. While having four different URLs reference the same content may not seem like a big deal, it can directly impact your website's search engine placement and, consequently, it's traffic. To a search engine, those four different URLs represent four different pages, even though the all produce the same content.

To understand how allowing duplicate URLs in your website can affect your search engine placement, first understand that search engines base a page's placement in the search results based, in part, on how many other websites link to the page. Now, imagine that there are 1,000 web pages from other websites that link to your homepage. You might conclude, then, that a search engine would rank the importance of your homepage based on those 1,000 links. But consider what would happen if 25% of those links linked to http://yoursite.com, 25% to http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, and so on. Rather than your homepage reflecting 1,000 inbound links, instead the search engine assumes there are only 250 links to http://yoursite.com, only 250 links to http://yoursite.com/default.aspx, and so on. In effect, redundant URLs can dilute your search engine ranking.

A key tenet of search engine optimization is URL normalization, or URL canonicalization. URL normalization is the process of eliminating duplicate URLs in your website. This article explores four different ways to implement URL normalization in your ASP.NET website.

How to get a Website/URL Thumbnail/Screenshot with C#.NET 2.0 in VS 2005

This article explores the open source Flickr API library called Flickr.Net, which was created by Sam Judson and was used in my aforementioned project. Specifically, well look at how to create an ASP.NET website that displays a smattering of randomly selected pictures from a particular Flickr user, along with how to show a specific pictures comments (if any exist). And the complete code in both Visual Basic and C# is available for download at the end of this article.

UltimateSearch is a set of ASP.NET controls to provide search functionality at your website. * Search Engine - Add a search engine to your website quickly and easily. * Extensive Document Support - ASPX, ASP, HTML, PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, TXT, and many more. * Advanced Search Types - Provide advanced search options such as all words, any word, exact phrase, and partial match. * Auto Suggestions - Display suggested search terms as the user types in the search textbox. * Multi-Domain Search - Index as many websites and web applications as you wish into one common dictionary.

Chances are, at some point you've tried creating a new user account on a website and were told that the username you selected was already taken. This is especially common on very large websites with millions of members, but can happen on smaller websites with common usernames, such as people's names or popular words or phrases in the lexicon of the online community that frequents the website. If the user registration process is short and sweet, most users won't balk when they are told their desired username has already been taken - they'll just try a new one. But if the user registration process is long, involving several questions and scrolling, it can be frustrating to complete the registration process only to be told you need to return to the top of the page to try a different username.

Many websites use Ajax techniques to check whether a visitor's desired username is available as soon as they enter it (rather than waiting for them to submit the form). This article shows how to implement such a feature in an ASP.NET website using Membership and jQuery. This article includes a demo available for download that implements this behavior in an ASP.NET WebForms application that uses the CreateUserWizard control to register new users. However, the concepts in this article can be applied to ad-hoc user registration pages and ASP.NET MVC.

Read on to learn more!

Website testing techniques