ASP.NET MVC

Really, I never paid much attention to Search Engine Optimization other than the basics.

But when I designed and implemented this site 1 1/2 years ago, I decided to intentionally ignore all SEO tricks and tips that people commonly publish. Worse, I decided to deliberately do things really poorly. I was just curious to see if it really made a difference.

First I use a Flash menu and a Flash header. Then, the site was using DotNetNuke until about 2 months ago, with just a small menu at the bottom of the page. Of course, along with the usual semi-giant ViewState and non-W3C compliant HTML.

I noticed that my blog entries were poorly indexed by Google and overall the site ranked very low on searches, even for fairly specific keyword combinations, which I would have expected to perform better. Even with my deliberate attempts to break SEO, I would have expected a bit better results.

As I was working on my little MVC project, I decided to convert this site to ASP.NET MVC, blog and all. It still looks the same and acts the same, same skin, same Flash menu and same deliberate SEO mistakes. But, I dumped the ViewState, cleaned the HTML to be fully W3C compliant and use compression to minimize the resulting HTML. With just these small changes, I noticed a significant increase in traffic and noticed that particularly the blog entries rank significantly higher and are much better indexed by Google.  

But it does look like just making the content more accessible to Google gives a boost to rankings (well, that is actually as expected as that is one of the recommendations).

Now I wonder how much better things could be if I actually followed SEO recommended practices...