StoreFront 6.0 URL Rewriting

I have a small project involving converting web addresses like category.aspx?id=6 into more search engine friendly web addresses like category6.aspx or even better sports_memorabilia.aspx. Search engines don’t like dynamic web pages with their lengthy query string values and would prefer a web address to a static web page with a HTML file extension. There are URL Rewrite server components that can trick search engines into seeing HTML static web pages that are actually dynamic web pages which just had the URL rewritten. www.caraccessories.com uses a URL Rewrite server component. Unfortunately, these URL Rewrite server components need to be installed on the web server and even worse, you need to restart the web services for any changes to take effect!

Recently I discovered a better way to do this for ASP.NET web applications. For an ASP.NET web application, you can rewrite the URL in the Application_BeginRequest subroutine of a global.asax.vb file. This works quite effectively for StoreFront 6.0 although you still need to use ASPX for the file extension instead of HTML.