Jack @ ASP.NET

As a software engineer, I focus on .NET, especially asp.net, C#, WCF and so on, and I am also very interested in Search Engine Optimization.

Entries for the ‘webmaster’ Category

WebMatrix – Microsoft’s new web tool

What Is It?

WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Why Use It?

You will use the same powerful Web server, database engine and web framework that will run your Web site on the Internet, which makes the transition from development to product seamless. Beyond ensuring everything just works, WebMatrix includes new features that make Web development easier.

Who’s it for?

WebMatrix is for developers, students, or just about anyone who just wants a small and simple way to build Web sites. Start coding, testing, and deploying your own Web sites without having to worry about configuring your own Web server, managing databases, or learning a lot of concepts. WebMatrix makes Web site development easy.

Code Without Boundaries

WebMatrix provides an easy way to get started with Web development. With an integrated code editor and a database editor, Web site and server management, search optimization, FTP publishing, and more, WebMatrix provides a fresh, new Web site development experience that seamlessly bridges all the key components you need in order to create, run, and deploy a Web site.

Top Features:

Small, but complete package

WebMatrix is a free Web development tool that installs in minutes and elegantly brings together a Web server, a database, and programming frameworks into a single, integrated experience. WebMatrix lets you code, test, and deploy both ASP.NET and PHP applications side by side.

Grows with you

With WebMatrix on your desktop, you’re using the same powerful Web server, database engine, and frameworks that your Web site on the internet uses. This ensures that your transition from development to production is smooth and seamless.

When you’re ready, WebMatrix integrates Visual Studio into your workflow. Connect to Visual Studio to take advantage of powerful features such as debugging and profiling. And when you’re ready for a high-volume relational database server, move your database and data from SQL Server Compact to SQL Server with just a click of the mouse.

Start > Open Source

WebMatrix connects you to a world of popular and free open-source Web applications, including DotNetNuke, Umbraco, WordPress, Joomla!, and more. Simply select an application from the built-in gallery, and WebMatrix handles the downloading and installation of your new Web site. The days of hand-editing configuration files and making sure you have all the right components are long gone. Customize your site using the built in code editor and make it yours.

Database made simple

Using a database has never been easier! WebMatrix includes a small, embedded database called SQL Server Compact that can live with your Web site code and content. Use it to start building your next Web site, and when you’re ready to publish, just copy the database file from your computer to any Web server and it will run— no extra installation required. Or you can easily migrate the database and data to SQL Server when you’re ready for high-volume traffic.

Elegant interface, simple experience

WebMatrix integrates a rich code editor, a database editor, Web server management, Search Engine Optimization, FTP publishing, and more, WebMatrix provides a fresh, new, Web site development experience that bridges all the key components you need to create, run, and deploy a Web site.

Simple to code

WebMatrix is the easiest way to learn standards-based Web development and makes it simple to build and publish Web sites on the internet. Start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then seamlessly connect to a database or add in dynamic server code using the new ‘Razor’ syntax for ASP.NET Web pages. Your code is easy to read, simple to learn, short to write and works with any text editor. Use built-in helper functions to connect to a database, display a Twitter feed, or embed a video. And with a seamless path to ASP.NET MVC it is now easier than ever to create powerful ASP.NET Web applications.

More than “Hello, World”

Want to display a Twitter feed? Need to show a video? Code helpers make common tasks easy to do with just a simple tag in your HTML.

Desktop or server, it’s all the same

WebMatrix uses the same powerful Web server, database engine, and frameworks environment that will run your Web site on the Internet, which makes the transition from development to product seamless.

Tightly knit, fully integrated

WebMatrix integrates with IIS Developer Express and is tightly linked with the Web server components that run your site. Directly monitor real-time Web requests and responses to track down problems right at the source. Missing an image? You’ll instantly see why and where, and WebMatrix will take you directly to the file to fix the problem.

Optimize for search

Run an SEO report and find how to make your site more visible to search engines. WebMatrix takes the secrets out of search engine optimization, provides clear guidance on how to make your site better, and even offers to take you right to the file in your site you need to fix.

Site publishing

With WebMatrix you can find the perfect home for your Web site. Use WebMatrix to find a Web host that fits your requirements and use the built-in publishing support for FTP, FTPS, and WebDeploy to ensure that your files, databases, and settings arrive intact on the web.

Try Expression Web 4 now

Microsoft Expression Web 4 is a professional development and design tool to create modern, standards-based Web sites that use PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX.
The highlight including:

  • Create standards-based Web sites faster & easier
  • Professional code editor & design surface
  • Make your site stand out with rich graphics support
  • Work with leading industry-standard technologies

What’s new in Expression Web

SuperPreview online service

The Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview online service is a beta service that extends the capability of SuperPreview to include support for additional browsers and operating systems.

SEO Checker

The SEO Checker feature of Expression Web analyzes your site against the best practices for getting the highest possible search-engine rankings for your site.

You can choose SEO options, display an SEO report, filter the results in the SEO report, and step forward and back through the list of results in the SEO report to see more detail for individual list items.

You can try the 60-day free trail at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7b10272b-2f96-4250-aede-3fcfadf26f34

jQuery 1.4 Released

In celebration of jQuery’s 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we’re really quite proud of it.

You can feel free to include the above URL directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.

With jQuery 1.4 we attempted to minimize any large upgrade hassles – maintaining the signatures of all public functions. That being said, please read through the list of potentially-breaking changes to be aware of what might cause problems in your applications.

Features

Below is an overview of all the changes and functionality added to jQuery 1.4. Additionally all of the changes have been documented in the jQuery 1.4 docs.

And you can go jQuery.com to view the detail

SEO via IIS and ASP.NET 4

IIS_SEO_toolkit_asp.net Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

The SEO Toolkit helps you improve your Website’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make your new or existing site content and structure more search engine-friendly. It works on any Website on the Web. Best of all – it’s a small, lightweight free download!

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include:

  • New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties
  • New Response.RedirectPermanent() method
  • New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms

 

You can use the above routes and methods for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based URLs.

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of feature improvements that make it easier to build public facing sites that have great SEO.  When combined with the SEO Toolkit, you should be able to use these features to increase user traffic to your site – and hopefully increase the direct or indirect revenue you make from them.

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is an IIS7 extension that helps identify search engine and user experience optimizations for Web sites. The following features are included:
Site Intelligence

  • Reporting and error identification for broken/invalid links, duplicate content, tag validation, etc.
  • Visibility into user routes, referring pages and other patterns
  • Drilldown into page resource usage and load time

Search Relevance

  • Best practice rules for optimizing URL structure for search engines
  • Extensibility model to enable integration for keyword acquisition
  • Automatic generation of search engine support files like sitemaps and robots.txt

Key Features including

  • Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines
  • Control how search engines access and display Web content
  • Inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing
  • Site Analysis Features
  • Robots Exclusion Features
  • Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features

 

Instructions

You will need to run the installation package as an administrator. This can be accomplished by one of the following methods:

  • Logging in to your server as an administrator account and then double-clicking on the MSI file.
  • Logging on using an account with administrator privileges and opening a command-prompt by right-clicking the Command Prompt menu item that is located in the Accessories menu for Windows programs and selecting "Run as administrator", then typing one of the commands listed below:
    msiexec /I IISSEO_x86.msi
    msiexec /I IISSEO_x64.msi

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them.

If you haven’t downloaded the SEO Toolkit and used it to analyzer your web-site yet, then spend 10 minutes now and give it a try.  You’ll find it provides a really easy, automated way to quickly find and identify SEO issues you have on your web-site – along with suggestions on how to fix them.  Fixing them will increase the traffic and visitors to your web-site.

Top 10 Free Ways to Increase Your Alexa Ranking

alexa-logo Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases on the level of traffic that each site receives from the number of people who visit it. So the more the number of traffic you get from your visitor, the more you’ll rank well in Alexa. How you can check your site rank in alexa is simply go to Alexa home page site and search for your own site.

In order to increase your Alexa ranking you must be proactive in your strategies and plan your steps carefully to succeed. With the right Alexa ranking you can demand higher prices from current advertisers and attract new advertisers just the same. If you want to increase your Alexa ranking, there are a few things you can do right now to get there. Remember in order to move up in your alexa rank, you have to bump someone out. You are competing for someone else’s ranking and you better be willing to do what it takes to achieve a higher ranking.

  1. The most basic step is install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox?s SearchStatus extension. Then you can set your blog as your homepage.
  2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your homepage. Maybe it?s a little annoying but trust me this step is very important. I?ve doing this, and in just couple days my Alexa Rank get raised for about 30%.
  3. Call your friends or your family, ask them to review and rate your Alexa website profile.
  4. Make a post about Alexa. It could be ?100 tips and tricks to increasing your Alexa Rank?, ?Increasing Your Alexa Rank in just 3 Seconds?, etc. Make sure you make an attractive title for your post. Your post will attract many bloggers and webmasters to read. If your post has certain quality, don?t be surprised if you get some juicy backlinks from them.
  5. Make useful articles then promote it on social networking websites. You can also promote it on many webmaster forums, such as Promo Junkie, Digital Point, etc.
  6. Make a cool and useful tool and post it on your blog. It can be a webmaster tools, etc. One of the good examples is TechCrunch’s YouTube Downloader. If your tool very useful, it will make visitors revisit to your website frequently.
  7. Make sure you Dugg or Stumbled your fresh post.
  8. Buy paid-traffic. Did you know that you can buy a thousand traffics at DigitalPoint as cheap as $1? Make sure that you pick a trustful traffic seller. You can also buy advertisements from Google, Adengage, etc. It’s cheap and very useful.
  9. If you want to use a free one, try Alexa auto-surfs. You can search it on Google. Try to use a good one.
  10. The last tips could be a little blackhat, so I don’t recommended it. The trick is by using your social network account on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc. Use attractive pictures and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. Yes, just that simple.

Have a try ~ ~