ONLINE BUSINESS PLATFORM. SEO Checklist: 7 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Sitefinity Website

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1 ONLINE BUSINESS PLATFORM SEO Checklist: 7 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Sitefinity Website

2 Before publishing a new Sitefinity website, you should validate that your pages are aligned with current best practices in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Sitefinity comes with great out-of-the-box tools that can be an enormous resource to you when developing your SEO strategy, a critical step if you are to avoid common SEO mistakes that set efforts back. This article provides a detailed checklist of tasks that will help maximize your SEO efforts. Complete these before you publish, and your SEO program will be in good shape. 1 URLs Clean URLs: Having special characters like '?', or '&' etc. in your URLs can prevent some search engines from indexing all the pages of your site. Sitefinity generates very clean and highly controllable URLs, not only for its pages, but also for all content items including, news, blogs, events, custom content types etc. This ensures that every search engine spider will be able to faultlessly crawl and index all pages from your website. Dashes are better than underscores: Underscores are alpha characters and thus do not separate words. Dashes are word separators, but should not appear too many times, or your URL could look spammy to the search engines. While typing the name of your new page, Sitefinity's URL routing engine will automatically replace all spaces with dashes so that you'll have only hyphen-separated words in your URLs (Figure 1). This allows for optimal indexing and recognition by search engines. è Keywords in the URLs are separated by hyphens è Each URL accurately describes the page è URLs are no longer than 100 characters Figure 1: Sitefinity's clean, and editable, URL generator. 2 Page Titles Well-written page titles and relevant keywords are extremely important in SEO. These are the title words displayed in your search results and they make a big difference, both in getting found by the browser, and with enticing clicks thereafter. When writing title tags, remember two important things: 1) make sure the title tag is unique, and 2) keep the title length below 65 characters, including spaces. Sitefinity will automatically generate a unique page title for each of your pages, which you can further modify if you wish. Before launching your website, be sure you include a title that both speaks to your customers and the browser. è Page titles are set è Page titles are unique è Page titles aren't too long (less than 65 characters) è Page titles don't contain domain names

3 Figure 2: Use descriptive and relevant titles for each web page. 3 Descriptions The meta description of your page is what end users will see in the search engine results. It should be very clear, to the point, and describe exactly what information is on your page. Another SEO best practice is to list keywords for your page in order from longest in length to shortest in length, separated by commas. Sitefinity's page creation form has dedicated fields for both the description and keywords. If you have a lot of pages and you're not sure which ones might be missing page descriptions/ tags, no worries. Sitefinity has a handy filter capability that allows you to view the pages without descriptions/tags so you can easily add them in (see Figure 3). è Page descriptions are set è Page descriptions are unique è Page descriptions don't contain page title è Page descriptions aren't too long (less than 150 characters) Figure 3: Filter all pages without set descriptions/tags. 4 Heading Tags Heading tags is one of the most important parts of the SEO checklist. You should only have one H1 tag on your page, and it should contain the focus keyword. For instance, with our Glacio example in Figures 2 and 3, the page is about a cooling pad. Consequently, the H1 should be something like Notebook cooling pad Glacio. It's important to make sure that you have one, and only one, H1 tag. Every other heading on the page should be designated H2, H3 and so on. The Paragraph Dropdown in the Sitefinity content editor displays a predefined set of heading tags (H1, H2 etc.) by default. This will make the optimization of your heading tags a piece of cake. è Each page has only one H1 tag. è The H1 tag contains the focus keyword. Figure 4: Sitefinity built-in content editor, in HTML mode.

4 5 Image Alt Tags Setting alt tags for images is one of the most common things to forget. However, you can boost your SEO results by adding optimized alternative text (ALT text) to all your images. It is important to know that this is the only attribute that gets indexed by search engines for the images. Sitefinity has a very handy and intuitive way to add alternative text to every single image. You'll also want to make sure you don't have too many images on the page. è The pages don't have too many images è The pages have no images without alt text Figure 5: Adding Alternative Text (ALT Text) to all images. 6 Link Anchor Text Using the correct words in the anchor text of your links is crucial. Too few and it won't make a difference. Too many, and you'll have a giant blob of linked text on your page. You should shoot for 3-4 words that explain exactly where the link is going to take the user. The anchor text management in Sitefinity is very intuitive. All you have to do is to select the desired text in the content editor and click on the Hyperlink Manager button. Then you can make the selected text (anchor text) a link to an external web address, or to a page from your site. è The anchor text of your links describe the content of the page it's pointing to è The anchor text isn't too short è The anchor text isn't too long (about 3-4 words) Figure 6: Inserting anchor text in Sitefinity.

5 7 Install Webmaster Tools Google & Bing as search giants know how to help site owners and webmasters approach search indexing. These services are normally free and easy to configure. Once you have verified your site, these tools will give you access to all sorts of information such as timed out URLs, unreachable URLs, not found pages, etc. It's important to install these before you launch your website, or shortly thereafter. Once you have created your webmaster tools accounts, you'll need to generate and submit a XML sitemap of your website. It just so happens that there is a fantastic free Sitemap generator plug-in for Sitefinity available on the marketplace. è Create a new Google/Bing Account è Install Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools è Check the Webmaster Tools for 404 / 500 errors, duplicate content, missing titles è Use a tool to find broken links (e.g. Xenu) è Submit a XML sitemap in the Webmaster Tools using the Sitefinity Sitemap generator plug-in At Sitefinity, we understand that SEO can be frustrating and expensive. That is why we equipped our CMS with great out-of-thebox tools to help the process along and empower our users to manage it all themselves. This SEO Checklist is yet another resource for all those webmasters wandering in the dense SEO wilderness trying to make sense of it all. No more paying expensive SEO companies to optimize your websites for you. You can do it all yourself with Sitefinity.

6 About Sitefinity Sitefinity is a modern online business platform which adapts to any business requirement and works equally well for online marketers, developers and IT managers. Sitefinity is used for all kinds of online applications from commercial websites to community portals and intranets, and scales effortlessly no matter the size of your project. Best of all, Sitefinity offers a simple, easy-to-use interface with a virtually flat learning curve that makes it a delight to use. Sitefinity powers more than 10,000 websites worldwide with a particularly strong presence in financial services, government and education. Global brands such as Kraft Foods, Dannon, Magna, BASF, Toyota, Chevron and Yale School of Management rely on Sitefinity every day. Sitefinity Around the World NORTH AMERICA BULGARIA UNITED KINGDOM GERMANY AUSTRALIA