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[Solved] SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

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sped asked on 15 Jan 2008, 04:44 PM

I currently work for a company where nearly 60% of traffic is driven by natural search (i.e. people typing keywords into Google for instance). This is a significant amount of traffic in essence for free (i.e. no spend on adverts) and anything that could affect this really worries an SEO Teams Manager.

I recently evaluated the ASP.NET Prometheus suite and was really impressed with all the compliance you have managed to achieved (e.g. XHTML, WAI A) but I have not found anything that shows how the controls support SEO best practice. This particular area is becoming more and more important for companies especially those who have dedicated SEO Teams and the slight hint that something could adversely affect rankings can stop adoption of what is an excellent control set.

To give an example - I am referring to the amount of HTML markup that can be created which can increase the code to content ratio which from an SEO perspective can negatively affect rankings (although to what extent it is difficult to quantify, it is more there is a risk). In the prometheus suite there are controls which render tables for layout, although this is XHTML 1.1 compliant it is not semantically correct, tables should be used for tabular data. I know this is to achieve layout, but CSS should be used for Visual Presentation but there appears to be no way to override this in the current controls so it does not output table markup (e.g. RadTextBox)

I know for many internal company web applications and external sites SEO doesn't matter, but for customer facing sites where a significant amount of traffic is driven by natural search and the fact it is such a competitive space anyway to quote a supermarket 'every little helps ...'

I would be interested in hearing peoples opinions on this and from Telerik particularly - is this something they have/will be addressing in a future release of prometheus and is there any information available to allow me to calm my SEO Managers fears.

3 Answers, 1 is accepted

answered on 15 Jan 2008, 05:22 PM

I've noticed this as well, one of the worst example of which is the RadTextBox control which has markup like...

    
            <div>    
        
             <table>    
        
              <tbody>    
        
               <tr>    
        
                <td> 
        
                 <label></label>  
        
                </td> 
        
                <td>    
        
                 <input />    
        
                </td>    
        
               </tr>    
        
              </tbody>    
        
             </table>    
        
            <div>

Id like to see the following html used this would solve my problems of growning html to text ratio while keeping the great functionality of the Telerik controls.

    
            <span> 
        
             <label for="x">Label</label> 
        
             <input id="x" /> 
        
            </span>

I'd quite like to see better symantic use of html within these controls for example the simple use of feildsets, labels and inputs would vastly improve the HTML in my applications.

answered on 18 Jan 2008, 03:37 PM

Hello and thank you for sharing your point of view.

I am glad to inform you that as of Q3 2007 SP1 (released on Jan 15, 2008) we offer a way to achieve a standard-compliant and search engine friendly rendering of RadInput (i.e. all kinds of textboxes and date/time pickers). As Chris suggested, the RadInput control renders <span><input /></span> instead of <table><input /></table> in the case when label and image button are not required. You can add labels and buttons separately and make them interact with the RadInput control.

As a front-end developer, I myself am a web standards enthusiast, but unfortunately, when it comes to development of web controls, some good practices have to be sacrificed for the sake of functionality. For example, speaking about RadTextBox and RadComboBox, a table is used so that several elements (textbox, button and label) occupy a specified amount of space without the need to calculate and reset widths on the client with Javascript.

We will publish a KB article about using the new semantic rendering with custom labels and buttons.

Best wishes,
Dimo
the Telerik team

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