Understanding ASP.NET 4 URL Routing in 2 minutes

What is SEO?
SEO,the Search Engine Optimization is the technique for improving volume of traffic to a webpage/website from search engines like BING,GOOGLE via "natural" or un-paid mechanisms
Why SEO?
Search Engine Optimization places a vital role for a website that is available for public. It helps to get traffic to your website. Improving traffic to your site from search engines gives you more site worth and more subscribers to the website or may lead to get revenue from the site obviously.

Why Routing is required?

In any ASP.NET application that does not use routing, the request will map to a particular file that serves the corresponding request.

For Traditional data driven applications where data gets retrieved from the database based on query string values will be given low ranking in Search Engines like Bing or Google. This is because search engines look more into URL to determine the relevancy of the content.

The URLs such as http://servername/automobiles.aspx?id=1 will be ranked lower than something like http://servername/automobiles/Cars.So it is very much important to meaningful URLs for Search Engine Optimization. URL Routing helps us in doing that.

ASP.NET4 URL Routing – What?
URL routing is the concept that enables to configure a web application to accept request URLs that do not map to physical files. As the name suggests routing is used to define URLs that are meaningful to users. This way of dynamically routing page URLs with relevant names can help for search-engine optimization (SEO).
How it is Important?
1. Enables Web developers to use URLs that do not need to map to a specific file
2. Can have semantically relevant URLs that will be easy to understand by users and search engines.
3. Provides class support by allowing users to define any Custom Route to a Web Form page
URL Routing is the concept that came along with ASP.NET3.5 SP1, this can be used in ASP.NET MVC applications to maintain SEO-Clean web 2.0 URLs.