DNN SEO Quickstart Guide
Posted by Tom on Monday, July 09, 2007 to DotNetNuke, SEO, SEM, DNN Tips and Tricks
This post is meant as a springboard for consultants, designers, programmers and end-users who are well-versed in DNN, but who may have some catching up to do when it comes to search engine optimization and search marketing. While I make some DNN-specific recommendations, most tips given here are applicable to any website, build on DotNetNuke or not. So here are my top ten SEO tips in order of priority. Actually, forget the order, it's not worth the fight. Just try to implement as many of these suggestions as you can.
- Take care of your meta tags, especially the page title and description. Include your most important keywords, but limit your titles to 65 characters including spaces. Choose modules with SEO in mind, such as Ventrian's News Articles, which writes the article title into the page title for you. Furthermore, write unique page descriptions for all your pages.
- Start attracting relevant links to your website. Note the word "relevant", meaning that some links are more valuable that others. If you are running a business around DNN as we do, then one link from dotnetnuke.com is much more beneficial than all the links in footers of client sites. As attractive links are hard to come by, consider submitting your URL to industry specific directories.
- Don't skimp on quality copy and content. That's what search engines live off. Use a free tool to do some basic keyword research and then sprinkle them around your copy. Don't forget the spell and grammar check, you are targeting (mainly) people after all. In my opinion, a professional copywriter is the most overlooked member of most web teams.
- Create an XML sitemap of your website and submit it to all major search engines. I prefer a tool such as xml-sitemaps.com to build my sitemaps over DNNs dynamically created sitemap file. Don't confuse this with a sitemap page, listing links to all of your pages, which is beneficial as well.
- Place a robots.txt file into the root of your site to guide search engine spiders. Take a look at the robots.txt file of the mothership for a DNN-centric example.
- Get into the game of local search if your websites promotes a "brick and mortar" business. Many searchers include some kind of local identifier such as the town, city or zip code, which catapults you to the top of the organic search results with minimal effort.
- Write well-formed, standard compliant HTML to improve accessibility and "crawlability." Consider excessive in-page JavaScript, HTML layout tables and frames junk food for search engines spiders. I'm well aware that strict XHTML remains a challenge with DNN, but let's make an effort to move away from quirks mode by adhering at least to XHTML transitional.
- Seek an alternative to DNN's default solpart menu and lead spiders deeper into and around your site with well-formed internal links (don't use tracking or logging with the announcement module and pay attention to how your editor of choice "builds" links.)
- Make DNNs friendly URls even friendlier with 3rd party URL rewrite providers such as this one or that one. These providers do have their limitations though, which is why I recommend them only for small to mid-size websites.
- Cut down on duplicate content by implementing a 301 redirect from non-www to www or vice versa. I also recommend going as far as hard-coding your login and register links into your skin to further minimize duplicate content created by the "returnurl" querystring parameter.
So there you have it, a high-level overview of search engine optimization techniques geared towards DotNetNuke based websites. Don't be fooled though, SEO and SEM have grown into vast fields with search engines constantly refining and tweaking their ranking algorithms. Another important point I would like you to carry close to your heart is that you are designing and building websites primarily for people and not for search engines. As long as you strive to serve your visitors well, search engines will follow.
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