How To: Use Meta Tags With ASP.NET Master Pages

Written by James on Wednesday, 21 of March , 2007 at 12:18 pm

There are many articles on adding meta tags to ASP.NET pages. Most involve adding meta tags programmatically, either directly in the page or by having all pages inherit from a base class. There is a better, simpler way.

Ready? Here’s the secret: Use a ContentPlaceHolder. That’s it.

Try it for yourself. Here’s a code example:

  <!-- Web.Master -->

  <%@ Master Language="C#" %>
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
  <head id="Head1" runat="server">
    <title>Master Page</title>

    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder runat="server" id="MetatagsContentPlaceholder">
      <meta name="description"
            content="This is the default description." />
      <meta name="keywords"
            content="keyword, keywords, key phrases" />
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
  </head>

  <body>
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder runat="server" ID="MainContentPlaceholder">
      default content
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
  </body>
    
  <!--ExamplePage.aspx-->
  <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Web.master" Title="Example Page" %>
  <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="MetatagsContentPlaceholder" Runat="Server">

    <meta name="description"
          content="Page-specific Description" />
    <meta name="keywords"
          content="keywords, for, this, page" />
  </asp:Content>

  <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContentPlaceholder" Runat="Server">
    You've got meta tags!
  </asp:Content>

I think that the reason for the less straight-forward solutions is Visual Studio. When attempting the above in Visual Studio, the following error is reported:

Error 1 Unrecognized tag prefix or device filter 'asp'.

This led me, at first, to think that the solution won’t work. Of course, running the example works just fine and produces the following HTML code:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
  <head id="ctl00_Head1"><title>
	  Example Page

  </title>
    <meta name="description"
          content="Page-specific Description" />
    <meta name="keywords"
          content="keywords, for, this, page" /></head>

  <body>
    You've got meta tags!
  </body>

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Category: ASP.NET, SEO

Hello world!

Written by James on Tuesday, 20 of March , 2007 at 2:28 pm

Welcome to www.artofprogress.com, home of Art of progress LLC. While the initial place-holder for this site was up, we published the article How To: Use Meta Tags With ASP.NET Master Pages. Thanks to this article and Google, artofprogress.com was getting visitors from all over the world before it was even ready for prime-time!

This site is now powered by WordPress - a blog engine that does more than you probably think. This will allow us to easily make updates, syndicate content, and change the look of the site on a whim. Real Web 2.0 stuff. It also saves money to run everything on open source software: Linux, PHP, MySQL, and of course WordPress.

In the next few months, there will be new announcements, a new look, and an article or two on managing software projects.

Stay tuned.

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