What is SEO?

Whenever we use some search engine we always see a lot of related web pages which belong to different websites. Ever thought what do the owners of these websites pay the search engines to refer them to you? Well this is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is the process which affects the visibility of a web page whenever we use some search engine. SEO is a magical and priceless thing for the websites owners as higher the rank of the web pages or the more the web pages appear in search results, the more will be the number of visitors on the website. 

 

If the website is publicly accessible and you aim to make money with it, then SEO should be of utmost importance to you. Website owners always strive to make their websites more and more SEO friendly to make them appear more frequently in the search results and thus attract more visitors to their websites. To make the websites SEO friendly there are a lot of techniques out there. Today I am going to discuss an open source content management system (CMS) known as DNN (DotNetNuke) which is better defined as a box of legos for building websites. This open source software provides a lot of features and one of them is being very SEO friendly. Following are a few tips and tricks to get SEO with DNN:

Lively Menus

DotNetNuke provides a great set of dynamic menus. It allows you to switch out the all the menus if you want to get a closer look as all the menus are expandable. However the search engines are better able to determine the navigational properties of the pages of the website if the website has semantic mark-up. For this purpose, you are better off using menus with XHTML markup and lowest possible HTML. DNN provides the DDRmenu for this purpose.

DNN’s URL Provider

The menu system is directly related to the URLs and mostly with URL providers also. The URL provider is of great importance. It creates and syntactically analyzes the URLs which are then inherited and used by all other elements including the menus. The way that URLs are created is very important and crucial in terms of SEO because if the URL is in human readable form then it will also be indexed by search engines. The URL provider should have many different properties like it should be able to provide short URLs, handle URL duplicates and manage all SEO stuff that is related to URLs. DotNetNuke provides a really good URL provider.

 

 

Site Map

Another cool feature which is provided by DotNetNuke is XML site map. XML site maps are used as standard by all major search engines and also by webmasters to declare that what is the structure of their websites and to tell what part of their website is more important. The search engines use this information to determine and also to help the website owners index properly the pages of their websites.

Page Settings

Page settings help you determine many different settings which ultimately help you make your webpage more SEO friendly.

• Header Tags: Page header tags prove to be very useful for a variety of elements, but putting canonical URLs in these tags will greatly help in SEO.
• Meta Data: The importance of each of these items that include title, keywords and description will continue varying constantly.
• Priority: It allows putting a valid priority value for each page between 0.1 and 1.0, 1.0 being the most important.

Site Settings

Site Meta Data: Filling this can allow you to automatically fill the page Meta data as these settings will automatically get injected into page settings.

Search Engines: An excellent feature to allow you to get your website registered for any one of the three search engines present in the drop down menu for indexing

Site Map/ URL: After the URL and site map is generated; you can submit your website’s site map to the search engines.

GA Module

All editions of DNN have the amazing Google Analytics (GA) Module included in them. This amazing software is pre installed and helps a great deal in generating SEO related data. The URLParameter setting also helps with campaign tracking.

To cut a long story short, DotNetNuke is not only a commercially available open source CMS but also a complete SEO friendly solution for the website owners. Hopefully with the help and guidance of this article and with DNN you will be all set to turn your website into a SEO friendly website.