Best SEO Friendly URL’s for ASP.NET Core 2.0

Best SEO Friendly URL’s for ASP.NET Core 2.0

CheapASPNETHostingReview.com | Best and cheap ASP.NET core 2.0 hosting. For some reason there are not a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) blog posts or projects out there. Taking a few simple steps can make your site rank higher in Google or Bing search results so it’s well worth doing.

What is an SEO Friendly URL?

Essentially you want a simple short URL that tells the user what they are clicking on at a glance. It should also contain keywords pertaining to what is on the page for better Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In short, a page will appear higher up in search results if the term a user searches for appears in the URL. Your URL should look like this:

SEO-Friendly-URL

The URL contains an ID for a product and ends with a friendly title. The title contains alphanumeric characters with dashes instead of spaces. Note that the ID of the product is still included in the URL, to avoid having to deal with two friendly titles with the same name.

If you elect to omit the ID, then you have to do a lot of footwork to make things work. Firstly, you have to use the title as a kind of primary key to get the product data from your database and secondly, you also have to figure out what to do when there are two pages with the same title. Each time you want to create a new title, you have to scan your data store to see if the title already exists and if it does either error and force the creation of a different title or add make it unique by adding a number on the end. This is a lot of work but does produce a nicer URL, the choice is yours.

How to Build One

Take a look at the controller action below. It is a very simple example of how to use SEO friendly URL’s. In our example we have a product class which has a ID and title properties, where the title is just the name of the product.

All the work is done by the FriendlyUrlHelper which turns the product title which may contain spaces, numbers or other special characters (which would not be allowed in a URL without escaping them) into a lower-kebab-case title.

This generated friendly title is compared with the one that is passed in and if it is different (Someone may have omitted the friendly title or mis-spelled it) we perform a permanent redirect to the product with the same ID but now with the friendly title. This is important for SEO purposes, we want search engines to only find one URL for each product. Finally, if the friendly title matches the one passed in we return the product view.

The FriendlyUrlHelper

The FriendlyUrlHelper was inspired by a famous StackOverflow question ‘How does Stack Overflow generate its SEO-friendly URLs?‘. The full source code for it is shown below.

The difference between my version and the one in the StackOverflow answer is that mine optionally handles non-ASCII characters using the boolean remapToAscii parameter. This parameter remaps special UTF8 characters like ‘è’ to their ASCII equivalent ‘e’. If there is no equivelant, then those characters are dropped. All modern browsers except Internet Explorer and Edge display the ‘è’ correctly. Older browsers like Internet Explorer percent encode these international characters so they are displayed as’%C3%A8′. What you set this to depends on whether your target users are English speakers and if you care about supporting IE and Edge. I must say that I was hoping Edge would have added support so that remapToAscii could be turned off by default but I’m sorely dissapointed.

Using the third parameter you can specify a maximum length for the title with any additional characters being dropped. Finally, the last thing to say about this method is that it has been tuned for speed.

Where Can I Get It?

This is a great little snippet of code to make your URL’s a human readable, while giving your site an SEO boost. It doesn’t take much effort to use either. This helper class is available in the Boilerplate.AspNetCore NuGet package or you can look at the source code in the ASP.NET MVC Boilerplate Framework GitHub page.