DNN SEO Case Study Part 1

From Mitchel: I'm happy to announce that Tom Kraak of Seablick Consulting will lend his expertise in the area of DNN Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and DNN Ecommerce as a guest blogger on MitchelSellers.com. You may already know Tom from his own blog or have seen him lurking around the DNN forums, DNN conferences and community events … welcome Tom!

Mitchel recently relaunched his company website and while certainly functional and visually pleasing, there is room for improvement on the search engine optimization front. So let’s help out a good friend and business partner by applying my DNN SEO Quickstart Guide to IowaComputerGurus.com (ICG.)

Title and Description Meta Tags

First, let’s change the home page title from "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc." to "DotNetNuke Modules & Custom .NET Development | IowaComputerGurus." The title now contains important keywords and at the same time much better reflects the company and its mission. While branding is important, I do prefer to put keywords first and the brand name last especially for product and service oriented small businesses.

While it can be challenging to stick to the recommended limit of 65 characters including spaces for page titles, we do have slightly more freedom when it comes to the meta description (about 100 characters more to be exact.) With that in mind, let’s rewrite "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc. a Des Moines Iowa based software consulting firm. Specializing in .NET and DotNetNuke solutions" to something more enticing such as "As a Microsoft Certified Partner, IowaComputerGurus provides information technology consulting services with a focus on .NET and DotNetNuke software development." Remember, as opposed to the page title, the meta description carries almost no weight as a ranking factor and therefore acts more like a pay-per-click ad with the main purpose of attracting clicks in search engine result pages (SERPs) by accurately describing the page content.

Here is one more suggestion of a meta title and description combination, this time for the Custom Module Development page:

Custom DotNetNuke (DNN) Module Development | IowaComputerGurus

IGC specializes in the development of custom DotNetNuke modules by following DNN programming best practices and a proven approach to software development.

Link Building

Yahoo! Site Explorer reports about 9,000 off-domain, incoming links to the ICG home page, which in part contributes to the healthy 5 Google toolbar PageRank. However, the majority of these incoming links are from Mitchel’s own blog as well as the dotnetnuke.com forums, where Mitchel is one of the most active participants. So I recommend diversifying by seeking links from relevant business partners, affiliates and organizations (such as the Microsoft Partner program, the local chamber of comments, etc) and reputable directories. Furthermore, it’s important to pay attention to the anchor text of any links to be acquired going forward. I do realize that this is not always possible, but if the opportunity does arise, Mitchel should request keyword-laden anchor text such as "DNN Module Development" and "Free DNN Modules" pointing to the appropriate pages.

Quality Copy & Content

In regards to website copy and other textual content, IowaComputerGurus.com is a bit too wordy for my taste. I would eliminating some of the corporate jargon and then rewrite the copy starting with the home page by injection keywords and key phrases gathered from free tools such as this one, that one or even Google itself (search for "DotNetNuke" and scroll to the bottom of the search engine result page to find the "searches related to" section.) Also, short of combining MitchelSellers.com with IowaComputerGurus.com, I would reserve case-study type articles for ICG to satisfy the hunger of search bots for fresh and original content.

XML Sitemap

I usually shun DNN’s native xml sitemap implementation and use a 3^rd party tool such as this one instead, but for a site mainly build around traditional DNN pages it works quite well as all relevant pages are indeed present in sitemap.aspx. While that’s a good start, I still don’t like the idea of having the lastmod, changefreq, and priority nodes read all the same for every single page. Call me picky, but that takes me straight back to my Notepad "drawing board." And lastly, to get the most of an xml sitemap, I suggest submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center.

Robots.txt Exclusion Protocol

Mitchel currently has no robots.txt file in the root directory of IowaComputerGurus.com (server returns a 404 HTTP status code), which signals to the search engines that access is allowed to all resources served by the website. That’s not an ideal situation as some of DNN’s supporting directories and files have no business being indexed and subsequently appearing in SERPs. To remedy that, I usually recommend using dotnetnuke.com’s robots.txt implementation as a base and then adding exclusions specific to your website. In the case of ICG, I would at least additionally disallow /home/ctl/privacy.aspx, /home/ctl/terms.aspx, and /forums/afv/ to restrict access to the privacy statement, terms of use, and certain areas of Active Forum.

That wraps up part one of my SEO overhaul of IowaComputerGurus.com. Check back in a week or two as I conclude this series with a closer look at local search, search engine friendly skins and menu systems as well as Url rewriting and canonicalization.

And as always, comments and questions are appreciated.

Posted by Tom on Friday, September 19, 2008

Tags: DotNetNuke, Tutorials, DotNetNuke Administration

Comments

I have tested a number of Google Site Map generators and I have to say the best so far is Ifinity Solutions.
1) its free
2) it can create entries for modules such as Ventrian' New Articles and DNN blog. If you have a blog on your site you want this provider.

http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Google_Sitemap_For_DNN/

It would be great if other developers made extension for their modules too.

I wouldn't worry too much about the expire etc. Google has stated its primary objective is to find official pages and it largely ignores the rest.

By Lance on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 8:38 AM

I also use a robots.txt to ban URLs with "TabID" in them. All of my urls (worth indexing) are in the friendly URL format so this rule helps remove duplicates. This isn't optimal for all DNN sites however so careful.

By Lance on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 8:48 AM

Such pure and simple suggestions yet completely "foreign" to me. I've always been interested in SEO but never got it through my thick skull until reading through this today. Duh! You guys rock!

By Jon Seeley on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 9:40 AM

Good post. I have a couple of comments:
1. Titles and Descriptions --- I have been told that Google view words separated by commas as potential keywords, so when possible separate sections of your title using commas and possible avoid a comma between city and state. For example, “Aging Safely Inc, Adult Family Home Placement Service, Woodinville WA” may be better than “Aging Safely Inc > Adult Family Home Placement Service > Woodinville, WA.”

2. XML Site Map --- is a real pain for me because my site has 40+ portals, and 100 pages that I want indexed that aren’t in the menu. I solve this by having a Site Map page that doesn’t use Ajax for searching the database and lists these pages. I have yet to find an automatic SiteMap.xml tool that works with sub portals. I test all pages with a Lynks-like browser to see exactly what pages and content Google will be able to see,

3. I have a complex robots.txt that de-indexs those directories and pages that I do not want index. DNN’s idea that a user provides a bad URL within the site, you are taken to the home page is a real pain in the butt. I have had to force some pages to return a 404 by hand, so that Google et al will forget about them. In some cases iFinity’s Friendly URL Provider helps by doing 301 redirects. In others it doesn’t.

4. “Local Businesses” have an interesting issue with keywords. If you are a plumber in one city, you want to show up in Google for all of the nearby towns you MUST work those town names into the text of you web page(s) so that customers will find you when they search for “plumber nearby-city” For local businesses I always have the City Sate in the title so that people searching with Google and find or ignore the listing quickly.

DaveS

By David Snow on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 9:44 AM

@ Lance - I agree, the iFinity sitemap provider is probably the best way to move forward instead of building this functionality “deeper” into the DNN core.

@ Jon – Thanks, I’m glad you found it interesting and helpful.

@ David

1. I’ve never heard of any kind preference for word separation in title and description tags … who exactly told you that?

2. How are your “sub portals” set up? Parent or child portals?

3. Note that robots.txt is not meant to “clean” SE indexes; it only prevents them from getting in in the first place. And iFinity Url Master has a setting to return a 404 for deleted or expired pages.

4. Good point. I will shed more light on local search in part 2 of this series.

By Tom Kraak on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 5:19 PM

I'd just like to add that I think the meta description is unfairly treated as a source of search rankings. While I agree that you should be treating it as pay-per-click copy to entice visitors, I have also read other people's comments to say they have seen an improvement on Yahoo and Live SERPs from tweaking the description. Google may pay no attention, but perhaps the others still do. At any rate, Google will highlight matching terms in the meta description, so it's still worth getting those keywords in if you can.

By Bruce Chapman on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 4:32 PM

I have read similar claims that Yahoo and MSN may still use the meta description as a ranking factor, but I think it's safe to assume that for a site such as ICG, most search traffic originates from Google. So it's vital to keep your target audience in mind.

But either way, Bruce is right, keywords should still make it into the meta description as all 3 major SE add the "bolding effect" in SERPs. If you give it some thought when trying to describe any given page, I find that keywords make it into the description quite naturally.

By Tom Kraak on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 4:47 AM

Great post.

I should have a good case study of a rather large real world example of a MS CRM to DNN SEO that we recently implemented for a site with over 100k products (feeding DNN in real time through WSDL).

We're using a lot of technique's found in our 'industry news' which is really just an aggregation of the best SEO blogs I can find.

http://www.theschafergroup.com/About/PressNews/IndustryNews/tabid/730/Default.aspx

Many of the techniques listed above are also being used, and others like keyword rich path structures using the older SEO friendly DNN page naming architecture.

Just thought I'd throw out another resource for those interested in DNN and SEO related information.

And to those not yet familiar with the term, you might want to consider 'semantic HTML' using natural H1-H6 tags to semantically tell the search engines what's important.

Sort of akin to the outline mode of a MS word doc.

To Your Success,
Brad

By Brad Schafer on Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 6:06 PM

Comments from the following blog entry: DNN SEO Case Study Part 2, located at: http://www.iowacomputergurus.com/blog/3/dnn-seo-case-study-part-2.aspx