Hello, My current site is pure HTML. I was planning to move it to ASP.NET instead of HTML so I can use "Include Files"/"Master Page" features so my repeatable content (banner, left menus, footer, etc) are in one place and I include them on all pages. Will this affect SEO ranking in any way ? Can you suggest any other SEO friendly way to structure the site so that instead of replicating the same HTML code (for banner, left menus, footer) on all pages, I was wondering if I can write these just once and then include the banner.html, footer.html, leftmenu.html on all the pages of the site. This will greatly reduce code for ease of maintenance and enhancements. If I need to change the left menus in the future, I could just make the change in the leftmenus.html file and that could be automatically reflected on all pages since the leftmenu.html file will be include on all pages. However the only way I know this would be possible is to use file includes in ASPX or some other kind of Server Side Includes. Thanks.
If it is done right, then asp.net page can be user-friendly / search engine friendly. The same effect can be done using PHP or coldfusion. You are moving to the right direction. Using static html is time consuming and make it hard to maintain a website.
You are getting yourselves muddled between what creates the page and what the browser works with. XHTML and XML are the outputs that get sent to the browser. XHTML/HTML is the norm along with javascript and CSS. Look out for the new technologies of HTML5. From the server's point of view all of these are just text files - even images which just get sent with fancy headers which tell the browser to handle them differently. So, on the server you can use java, php, asp, coldfusion, ruby, or perl to generate your text files. There are pros and cons for each but these don't relate to SEO in any way. The SEO factors come in what text is actually generated and that's down to the programmer and what they put in the files.