SEO Friendly URL Routing in ASP.NET

I stumbled upon this while answering to this in stackoverflow. So thought of sharing how to do this ASP.NET webproject.

Expectation / End Result

1. If you have Search.aspx file in project, it will automatically become SEO friendly, i.e., you can browse it like this “/Search” instead of “/Search.aspx”.
2. If you need to pass parameters to that page, say product name, then you can do that using “/Search/Kindle” instead of “/Search.aspx?productname=Kindle”.

Steps to achieve this are listed below:

Step 1

Install “Microsoft.AspNet.FriendlyUrls” from nuget package.

Open package manager console – Help. Then type the following:

Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.FriendlyUrls

Step 2

Then it will automatically add the following in RouteConfig.cs.

public static class RouteConfig
{
   public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
   {
      var settings = new FriendlyUrlSettings();
      settings.AutoRedirectMode = RedirectMode.Permanent;
      routes.EnableFriendlyUrls(settings); 
    }
}

Step 3

Add a webform with name say “Search.aspx”. And now if you browse http://www.example.com/Search, it will hit “Search.aspx”.

Now you are done with making SEO friendly URLS.

More Customization

Part – 1

If you want to make Search.aspx to be called as “Search-Product”, then you can do that using the following:

routes.MapPageRoute("", "Search-Product", "~/Search.aspx");

You need to add this to RouteConfig.cs, just after “routes.Enable…”

Now, if you hit this URL – http://www.example.com/search-product, it will hit search.aspx.

Part -2

Now, you may need to pass parameters to Search.aspx. Yes you can do that, use the following line instead of the above.

routes.MapPageRoute("Find", "Search-product/{productname}", "~/Search.aspx");

To get value of productname in Search.aspx, use the following “Page.RouteData.Values[“productname”]” in page_load or any other event in Search.aspx.

Example

I have created an example. Use the code suggested above. Hit the following URL:

Output in code is as follows:

Hope it works for all those following this blog.
CodeProject