Optimising an ASP Site

Hi

I am coding site to sell products online and I am coding in asp. Since the page is dynamically created so I was wondering if search engines read the html code that is generated or the asp code.

if it is the asp code how can I improve the site to rank higher

Thanks
Ktoc1

The easy answer is that spiers see your pages the same way that humans do, basically. Meaning that they only see the HTML pages that are output by the server, and not the back-end stuff in ASP (or PHP or whatever people use).

As for trying to get the pages to rank higher, that could be a challenge. The main points to remember are to have clean code, good tag placement (like no <H1>'s in the middle of a bunch of <P> tags) and definately keep URL variables down to two at a maximum. If you are up to it, the best thing is getting the server to re-write the page URL's to make them seem static. This can be done on Windows servers somehow, but I've got no idea how as I haven't had the (dis)pleasure of having to use them yet.

Hope this bit helps.

Hi ktoc1,

You can find some of the official guidelines on optimizing dynamically generated pages from Google at:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431

Basically, as what has been mentioned by Catacaustic, asp pages will appear as normal HTML files to users. Several special factors to take note are:

1. Ensure that your asp pages do not contain session ids.
2. Ensure your pages are not password protected. Meaning that general users should be able to browse through the site.
3. If there are parameters appending to the URLs, try to keep them as short as possible.

If you also include a plain text navigation bar at the bottom of all of your pages, that will help the robots to crawl your site and hopefully ensure that you don't end up with any "orphaned" pages.