12 Tips to Make SEO Easier in DNN

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a cross-functional discipline and to achieve findable websites, a variety of tactics must be employed. When building DotNetNuke (DNN) websites, optimizing your websites for findability can be exceptionally challenging. Rich, contextual content is the root of findability, but due to the nature of a content management system (CMS), content can have many disparate sources and control of your content can be unwieldy. In this article, I’ll list 12 tactics to make maintaining the fundamentals of findability in DNN easier.

1. Start Using Semantic Markup in the Skin

Semantic markup is crucial to providing context to your content. As modules are added to the page to create the content of your site, additional markup is often a necessary evil in providing the features native to DotNetNuke. By using semantically correct markup in your skin, you’re boiling the cream to the top. Here are a couple of ideas to give you a taste of how to accomplish this on your sites:

• Wrap the logo token with a H1 tag. The logo token will automatically generate an alt tag for the image set as your site’s logo. By wrapping the logo in a tag your sites’ title will have the highest priority on all pages. Depending on how far you want to take it, CSS text/image replacement may even be better.
• Wrap footer links in tags. Copyright, privacy statements, terms, and other global links should be considered a paragraph of links, make the markup reflect this.
  

2. Avoid the Managed Content Trap

DotNetNuke is a content management system, but this doesn’t mean everything has to be managed content. Evaluate your content like it is a garden – consider which content needs to be replanted frequently (managed content) and  which content is like a shrub or tree (not tended to frequently, visible throughout your site).  Plant the shrubs in your skin and if they need to be changed make a change to the skin. By planting content in your skin files, the content will be less obstructed by markup and maintain the original design.

3. Put Database-Driven Content to Work

The content in DotNetNuke is stored in your database – use this feature to dynamically inject content onto your pages. There are a number of dynamic content elements you can utilize to introduce content to your pages without using modules. Timo Breumelhof offers a very good list of DNN Attributes in vb.net that can easily be included in your skin files.

4. Evaluate Navigation Providers

image demonstrating the title tag added to navigation items in DNN NavPay attention to the features of the navigation provider you’re using. Many of the providers available have hidden gems that provide more content to the navigation than simply the page titles. Our friend and core navigation provider, DNN Nav provides an attribute in which you can specify a tooltip for each menu. The tooltip will be automatically generated from the page name, page title, or page description.

5. Make Content Editing “Dummy Proof”

If you open your content management responsibilities to multiple users with a range of skills, you may come back to your site’s content to find it is riddled with missing alt and title tags and inline styles have been used to make headings instead of proper headings tags. This can do a number on the design of your site as well as the findability of your content. Be prescriptive about how you allows editors to manage their content and make the content editing tools “dummy proof.” Previously, I have blogged about customizing the rich text editors in DotNetNuke (Telerik editor and FCK editor). By customizing your rich text editor, you can shepherd your content editors toward semantic content.

6. Extend DNN to Make your Site Smarter

There are numerous modules in the DNN ecosystem that aid in improving the fundamentals of SEO. I could dedicate a separate blog to this topic alone, but the key consideration is to consider looking for modules to aid in keeping your content findable and search engine optimized. Let’s take one module specifically and dream a little together. iFinity Inline Link Master allows you do the equivalent of find and replace throughout your content. Wouldn’t it be great if you helped content editors by automatically creating external and internal links based on common words or phrases? You could even add in the rich attributes that many content editors neglect.

7. Consider File System Naming

For the next two topics you have to buy into the following theories – 1) content is more than just text and 2) file system paths add context to images and documents on your site. Are you still with me? Great. As you start to build out the organization of your file system, considering the naming of your directories and files plays a role in the findability of your content. More and more search findability is more than just text. Making sure the files on your site are findable and relevant to search terms can only help improve the overall findability of your sites.

8. Customize your Child Portals’ Directory

If your installation utilizes the multi-portal features of DotNetNuke, think twice as you create new portals. There is an often overlooked feature DNN offers allowing you to create a custom portal directory.

9. Make your URLs Friendlier

DNN has been making a slow journey toward a friendlier URLs. If you’re interested (and you should be) in moving faster toward full control over your URLs there are a number of extensions that will give you a long list of features make your URLs even friendlier
Let Search Engines Know
The first few tips were mainly focused on making your content semantic and meaningful to search engines. Once you have you have rich, semantically-correct content on your site you’ll want to reiterate to the search engines what you want them to find. Whether or not they’ll pay attention to you is beside the point. DotNetNuke offers a variety of features to guide search engines through your content.

10. Submit a XML Sitemap

Each DNN site automatically generates a XML sitemap (sitemap.aspx) Page Priority Starting in DNN 5.01, individual pages can have a specific priority assigned in the XML sitemap. Starting in version 5.01, DNN allows you to explicitly assigning page priority to your pages to instruct search engine bots on the hierarchy of your sites’ pages. Additionally, it is important to submit your XML sitemap to search engines.

11. Plug in a Third Party Sitemap Provider

In DotNetNuke 5.3, things got even better when DNN make the search engine sitemap a provider allowing modules to plug into the sitemap and allowing module developers to create custom search engine sitemaps to expand on the core’s functionality.

12. DNN Takes Care of Meta Content

The last consideration is not so much a task, but a reminder to take care of your page meta content. DotNetNuke does a lot of the work for you in generating Demonstrate the source of meta content in DNN. It is arguable as to whether this content is relevant or considered in search engine rankings, but it can’t hurt to provide more context for your site.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each of these tips could be a case study on their own and I’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg. If there was a concise way to summarize this article, it would be - search engine optimization can’t be an afterthought. If you consider your content from design to implementation to ongoing maintenance the only “optimization” will be in honing your message, not redoing your site.

Google Analytics is one of those must-have tools when running a website.  The tasks of tracking traffic sources, browser versions, search terms, etc. are all made easy.  The developers of DotNetNuke have also made using Google Analytics on a DotNetNuke website simple.

Installing Google Analytics in DotNetNuke is a fairly common request from many individuals and I know it can be a quite troubling question for most. The primary questions are how and where can I put the javascript code provided by Google. Well you have a few options. First you could put the code directly in the skin for the site, the advantages to that would be that you will automatically have the code on all pages, however, the disadvantage is that you cannot use that skin as is on another portal due to the site specific Google information. I personally go the route of adding a text/html module to my site and set it to show on every page and insert the script in a very specific location which I will discuss below. There are a few drawbacks to this method. First you will not get any statistics information on traffic to “edit pages” where other modules are not displayed and you also will not receive information regarding administration modules. However, in most circumstances this shouldn’t be an issue.
The best way to include this information is to include the information in the Module header of the text/html module. This is to prevent the accidental removal of the script code

if you happen to click inside the module as an admin to enter in-line edit mode. Below I will walk you through the steps needed to implement Google Analytics using this method. (NOTE: you can extend this for other javascript integrations if needed).

Step By Step

• Add a new Text/HTML module to a page of your site, you can position it anywhere, but I recommend the bottom of the page as administrative users will still see the module when they are logged in

• Edit the text of the module to contain no text

• Enter the module settings from the SolPart Action Menu

• Expand the “Advanced Settings” section

• Check the box next to “Display Module On All Pages?”

• Insert your Javascript code in the “Header” box. This will ensure that the data is always retained

• Now under “Page Settings” -> “Basic Settings” un-check the following boxes

• Display Container

• Allow Print

• Allow Syndicate

• Ensure that the “Cache Time” is set to 0 (Caching appeared to cause issues with this implementation in my testing)

• Click “Update” to save your changes

This should complete the setup. You may now test to ensure everything is functioning correctly. You can log out as an administrator and view your site and no extra content should be displayed however if you look at the generated source you should see your javacript listed. Google Analytics should update within about 15 minutes to show that they are receiving your data.

Editing your own website can feel daunting, especially if it's not something you do every day. But it doesn't have to be! The following tips will help you with five of the most common tasks you'll perform on your DNN website.

1)Decrease Your File Upload Time

Save time - upload more than one file at a time! First, compress all the files you want to upload into a .zip file.  Then go to File Manager and select Upload A File.  Choose the zip file on your computer, then select which folder you want to upload it to. Be sure to check "decompress zip file." Now press the Upload File button.  This will move the single compressed file to the target location on the server, and decompress it.  So you just uploaded all of the files in the compressed folder with one upload.  If you are really watching your file quota, you may want to go back into the file manager and remove the zip file.  One downside of this little trick, it leaves the compressed file on the server after it is done.

2) Changing Your Workflow: Publish Content Before It's Visible

The more recent versions of DNN support this feature.  To turn this on, go to any HTML module settings.  Under HTML Settings, you'll find Work Flow. The default is Direct Publish while the other option is Content Staging.  If you choose Content Staging, the content will need to be published before it is made live on the site.  If you leave it as Direct Publish, the changes will go live as soon as you press save.  From HTML Settings, you can also see which modules are using these settings.  If you choose module, the setting is active in the module you are working on only. If you choose page, the setting is active on all of the HTML modules on the single page you are working on. If you choose site, the setting is active on the entire site.

3) Make Your Content Appear and Disappear Based on a Date Range

DNN Software has a date range on pages and modules that enables you to schedule a module's visibility. You can use many different variations of these 2 settings:

• Start Date (not supplied), Expiration Date (not supplied): module or page will always be visible
• Start Date (supplied), Expiration Date (not supplied): module or page will not be visible until the start date; once it is, if will show until you delete the page or module
• Start Date (not supplied), Expiration Date (supplied): module or page will be visible immediately and will continue to be visible until the expiration date.
• Start Date (supplied), Expiration Date (supplied): module or page will be visible on the start date and automatically stop showing on the expiration date.

4) Accidental Deletions: You Can Recover Them!

Don’t worry.  If you unintentionally deleted something, go to Admin-> Recycling Bin.  You'll see a tab for pages and a tab for modules.  Choose which one you need and click Restore Selected Pages or Restore Selected Modules. Do not click Empty Recycle Bin. If you do, you'll need to contact our support team for a more involved solution.

5)  Copying and Pasting Advice

If you've ever tried to copy and paste from a third party editor (like Word), you may have noticed that everything ends up looking funky. There's a reason for this.  Word uses several hidden characters for formatting that you never see while typing or copying. But you definitely see the end result when you press save! Because of this, DNN Software provides a tool for you to migrate your content from your editor to your website.  Check out the toolbar of your HTML/Text Editor, and you'll see a paste options button. Your choices are:

• Paste (same as Control + V): this will paste the contents of your clipboard to your web editor.
• Paste from Word: this strips out any non-essential word tags and characters.  This will leave the fonts in place.
• Paste from Word, strip font: this is the same as Paste from Word, only now we strip the fonts as well.
• Paste Plain Text: this means no fonts, not formats, no fluff.  Just text.
• Paste As HTML: this pastes the content in your clipboard as HTML code.
• Paste HTML: this will paste HTML code directly to the text editor.
  

We recommend using either the Paste from word, strip font or Paste as plain text.  If you strip the font, the content will adopt the font that the rest of your site uses.  This means everything still looks uniform.  If you don’t mind going back in and reading some bolds, underlines, lists, or any of that, then Paste plain text is for you.  This will make sure that just words, numbers and punctuation get pasted.