Search engines optimisation, SEO, is an evolving ’science’ and it keeps changing on purpose. Most articles that I read which involve both SEO and ASP.NET usually focus on how to programatically set the meta keywords tag and they tend to make it look like very important while, as of today, it has minimal effect on optimisation.

Generally, web developers tend to turn the blind eye when it comes to SEO while a great part of SEO should be done by developers. Here are three rules for .NET developers to follow while building a site:

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Visual Studio 2008 is a huge resources consumer, it takes long to load then long to open your solution, long to run it and debug it. I have been using it for more than a year now after setting VS 2005 to retirement. I have VS 2008 set on a high perforamce Vista Business laptop with 2GB of memory.

While working with ASP.NET on VS 2008 my colleagues and myself started to notice some patterns when running or debugging a web project that will improve performance rapidally. Tricks that do really work and we laugh every time they work at how silly they are.

Here are two interesting tips that we encountered:

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In the pre-LINQ days, I used to use the classical 3-tiers architecture for designing ASP.NET web projects, the user interface (UI), the business logic layer (BLL) and the data access layer (DAL).

My DAL layer used to rely on Microsoft’s Data Access Application Block (DAAB) which abstracted the repetitive and boring ADO.NET implementations. There are some 3rd party tools such as SubSonic, which has some common features with LINQ, or NHibernate, however, I would rather use the enterprise library.

Let me quickly illustrate the way to solve a problem with the classical architecture. This is a simple business problem, a website that has many brands and each brand has an advertising campaign. To access the campaign stats, which are supplied by the campaign agency, we need to access the agency’s webservice by providing our brand credentials. We simply store these login credentials in our database -> retrieve login info of a brand -> call the webservice -> display the stats on a web page.

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I redesigned my website, adhered to the XHTML standards, validated on the W3C validator and everything went alright, now the last step, cross-browsers compatibility tests.

First step, I need to look at the previous stats to learn what browsers are support-worthy. And? Surprise, surprise! IE6 is still alive with quarter of the IE users! But why?! My blog is targeted at the IT pros which are expected to be on modern browsers.

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The story began when my wife asked me “Oh my lord, I want a blog.” I was extremely happy to fulfil her request as now she can post her thoughts and save me listening . I answered, “My dear queen, I shall grant thee a weblog.”

.NET blog engines for non-techies anyone? I found only two, BlogEngine.NET and dasBlog and they both don’t suit her royal needs. What do the majority of bloggers use? WordPress? But that is PHP?! I’m not touching PHP, I wouldn’t be happy if a mate of mine told me “So, Adam, you are using PHP.” I, who spent hours arguing with the open source blokes, from university professors to collegues to online forums to developers in meetings.

I thought, what is more important? Turning down her highness’ request or betray my oath to Microsoft and .NET community? And the answer, as you have already guessed, the second option.

And the moral of the story is? Check my wife’s blog.