SEO-Friendly URLs in ASP.Net MVC 3

One of the most important things for a modern day website is for it to be easily found. If nobody can find your website, then it isn’t very useful. Google will usually rank a site higher with a URL like http://www.yourdomain.com/products/3/aniseed-syrup compared to http://www.yourdomain.com/products/3. In addition to being ranked higher by search engines, it is a lot easier for humans to remember as well. I am going to show you an easy way to create these SEO-style routes for your ASP.net MVC 3 applications.

1. Create a new project.

2. Create ADO.NET Entity Data Model and named NorthwindModel (I use Nortwind database for this tutorial)

3. Create a new controller and named ProductController.

4. Next we need to do in order to get this to work is create a route that will match this pattern. To do this you add new router in RegisterRouter method

routes.MapRoute(
                "NamedProduct",
                "product/{id}/{name}",
                new { controller = "Product", action = "Details", name = UrlParameter.Optional },
                new { id = @"^\d+$" }
            );

Note: you add new this router on above default router.

5. Create a new folder named Helpers in project so create a new class named StringHelper in Helpers folder.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace MvcApplications.RewriteURL.Helpers
{
    public static class StringHelpers
    {
        public static string ToSeoUrl(this string url)
        {
            // make the url lowercase
            string encodedUrl = (url ?? "").ToLower();

            // replace & with and
            encodedUrl = Regex.Replace(encodedUrl, @"\&+", "and");

            // remove characters
            encodedUrl = encodedUrl.Replace("'", "");

            // remove invalid characters
            encodedUrl = Regex.Replace(encodedUrl, @"[^a-z0-9]", "-");

            // remove duplicates
            encodedUrl = Regex.Replace(encodedUrl, @"-+", "-");

            // trim leading & trailing characters
            encodedUrl = encodedUrl.Trim('-');

            return encodedUrl;
        }
    }
}

6. Edit code of  ProductController

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using MvcApplications.RewriteURL.Models;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using MvcApplications.RewriteURL.Helpers;

namespace MvcApplications.RewriteURL.Controllers
{
    public class ProductController : Controller
    {
        NorthwindEntities dbContex = new NorthwindEntities();

        //
        // GET: /Product/

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View(dbContex.Products);
        }

        //
        // GET: /product/3
        public ActionResult Details(int id, string name)
        {
            Product product = dbContex.Products.FirstOrDefault(p => p.ProductID == id);

            // Redirect to proper name
            if (name != product.ProductName.ToRewireUrl())
                return RedirectToActionPermanent("Details", new { id = id, name = product.ProductName.ToRewireUrl() });

            return View(product);
        }

    }
}

7. Edit Index.cshtml file

@model IEnumerable
@using MvcApplications.RewriteURL.Helpers

..............

@Html.ActionLink("Details", "Details", new { id = item.ProductID, name= item.ProductName.ToRewireUrl() }) |

8. Build and run application