DNN as a Search Engine Friendly CMS
SEOmoz mastermind Rand Fishkin recently voiced his opinion on "choosing the right CMS platform for your Website from an SEO perspective" and sparked a healthy discussion mostly driven by people familiar with PHP-based frameworks and content management systems.
The big question that comes to mind for us obviously is how DNN stacks up when it comes to features and capabilities in support of SEO. So let's look at the "12 basic SEO issues that frequently plague content management systems" according to Rand Fishkin.
- Title Tag Customization & Rules
DotNetNuke makes it straightforward and easy to specify title tags on a "page-specific level" as long as the page is a traditional DNN page, meaning it's listed under Admin > Pages. Beyond that, things get a little more dicey as the responsibility shifts to the module that's driving the page. Multi-page modules such as Ventrian's News Articles provide some control over page titles while others such as Active Module's Active Forum allow no control over title tags at all.
- Static, Keyword-Rich URLs
Even though DNN now features "human friendly" URLs, that's not nearly enough. Basic requirements such as hyphen separated words are still not met out of the box let alone custom URL creation. Luckily, the community has stepped up in the form of custom URL rewriting providers.
- Meta Tag Customization
Along the lines of the title tag, DNN won't make you sweat over meta description tags or robots tags for conventional DNN pages, but I've only come a across very few modules that allow you to control descriptions and other meta tags in their page hierarchies. Bottom line, choose your modules wisely or build your own.
- Enabling Custom HTML Tags
This is a no-brainer, as it's fairly safe to say that all DNN rich-text editors in use today allow manual editing of HTML simply by switching into "Source" view. You may even go a step further by customizing a variety of drop-down boxes found on editor toolbars.
- Internal Anchor Text Flexibility
You are safe with DNN on this one as well, as there are a plethora of ways to optimize internal linking. Everything from the rich-text editor just mentioned to the good old, very flexible Links module comes to mind (just stay away from link tracking and logging.)
- Intelligent Categorization Structure
While fairly limited out of the DNN box, "customizable navigation panels" as Rand calls them, are well covered by component vendors such as Telerik who've turned their navigational controls into DNN providers. DNN module developers such Snapsis Software and others have stepped up as well to offer flexible menu and navigation systems.
- Pagination Controls
DNN does not concern itself with pagination controls as all content is managed by modules. So again, take SEO into account when researching modules. For instance, while I consider News Articles templates to be the module's best feature, there is currently no easy way to nofollow the pagination links.
- 301-Redirect Functionality
You are on your own when it comes to redirects as there is currently nothing build into the DNN core to manage content redirection. I've come across modules that claim to handle proper redirection, but I have not tested any of them. Instead, I prefer the approaches described here. However you implement your redirects, make sure to test for the 301 http status code.
- XML/RSS Pinging
While most modules these days (including the "core modules") provide some form of content syndication, "accurate pinging" is not as widely supported. In fact, I've only seen it in commercial modules, but then again, I have not investigated much in the is area. Please educate me on this topic.
- Image-Handling & Alt Tags
Alt tags are handled well by the rich-text editor. If you use other, more elaborate modules or components to manage images or image galleries, make sure alt tags have been considered during module or component design.
- CSS Exceptions
Most DNN rich-text editors easily allow for "manual exceptions" to the styles defined in skin.css or any other style sheet. This is definitely a boon to educated users and content editors, but in my experience, most average users are not aware of "proper semantic markup" nor do they care.
- Static Caching Options
With the 4.0 release, DNN has been optimized for performance and we now have multi-level caching as well as compression to our disposal. However, "extraneous database connections" are still a concern, especially when using features such as the DNN Site Log, which in my eyes is much better handled by 3rd party analytics providers.
Considering that there is still no member on the DNN core team dedicated to SEO, I think the framework fares fairly well. I hope Cambrian will further address XHTML compliance as well as URL rewriting and content redirection. Everything beyond that is pretty much the responsibility of modules.
What do you think? Do you consider DNN a SEO-friendly CMS? Please share in the comments below.
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