A Point to Share
bits on social media, collaboration & SharePointSharp SEO Tools for Sharepoint
This week, we progressed in making our SharePoint-based company website more “search engine optimized”. For those of you who don’t already know, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site ranking within internet search results. The higher the ranking, the quicker a user can get to your website, therefore, potentially increasing the volume and traffic to your website.
Google provides an excellent SEO Starter Guide for webmasters and site owners which documents these optimization best practices.
So how straightforward is it to “optimize” a public-facing SharePoint site, you might ask?
Not so straightforward in my opinion.
What we learnt fairly quickly was that there are either, built-in mechanisms that hinder some SEOs or, SharePoint doesn’t provide auto-mechanisms to accomplish other SEOs leaving you with the laborious task of making manual changes.
The aspects of our website that we wanted to focus on were:
- Page names and titles
- Page descriptions and keywords
- XML-based SiteMap
SEO best practice: Create unique and revelant page titles
Creating site, page or article content titles that are accurate, unique and relevant is one of the more essential SEO tips documented. Moreover, for the pages to be accurately and consistently indexed, these titles should also appear in the browser title.
Up to a point, assuming that content writers are creating meaningful titles, this can be accomplished fairly simply in SharePoint by ensuring that the HTML title attribute in a sites page layout or associated master page is being populated with dynamic user-generated content. Avner Kashtan provides a pretty good example of it in his article about customizing MOSS page titles.
But how is the page title used when formatting the site URL?
This is where things get icky in Sharepoint.
Its important to note that when creating a publishing page with a title like, “Cool tools in CodePlex”, standard sharePoint automatically generates and appends to the URL the page name (or slug) as “cooltoolsincodeplex.aspx”. Besides being ugly and difficult to read, a url containing this sort of page name is also difficult for search engines to decipher and accurately index, decreasing the chances for the page to receive a high ranking in search results.
Its true that a content writer can overwrite this auto-generated page name before submitting the new page, but most of the time, in reality this doesn’t happen.
The solution: Imtech SharePoint Slug Feature
I was overjoyed, therefore, to find that Waldek Mastykarz created a simple and very effective feature that overcomes this Sharepoint annoyance. In a nutshell Waldeks feature, once activated hooks into the Create Page module and not only separates all the words by hyphens(-) but also removes unneccessary noise words.
A slug like cooltoolsincodeplex.aspx is automatically substituted for cool-tools-codeplex.aspx providing simplicity to both the user and search engines.
SEO best practice: Use meta tags for page descriptions and keywords
Creating rich and meaningful descriptions meta tags is another recommendation that search engines emphasize. In fact creating unique descriptions for each page within your site is the best way to go.
SharePoint does enable users to create unique descriptions for each separate site page. Unfortunately, though, there is no standard feature available to include these descriptions in the page meta-data attributes, making it seemingly worthless for external search engines.
The solution: Metatagger Feature by David San Filippo
This solution took me a little bit longer to stumble upon but certainly brought a smile on my face after installing and testing. David has built a feature that leverages a cool SharePoint Delegate control to insert various different meta-data tags at runtime. The source of these tags are the corresponding custom field properties such as description, keywords or author which can easily be populated by content owners while creating the page. David has provided a smart and useful feature for SharePoint users which is surely lacking in the standard SharePoint product.
SEO best practice: Create an XML Sitemap for your website
A XML SiteMap is similar to an html sitemap you provide to users that displays all the page links that exist on your site. Except, the XML-based file is the standard format used by internet search engines to discover pages, structure and hiearchy of your site. Additionally, a SiteMap also helps search engines define the frequency of page content updates and rates the importance of a page in relation to other pages within your site.
It was disappointing to see that default SharePoint platform doesn’t provision any mechanism for creating and maintaining an XML SiteMap.
The solution: Sharepoint SiteMap Generators
I found several SiteMap generators out there but the following two solutions stood out in my opinion as the best ones since they are created specifically for SharePoint and they automatically keep the SiteMap updated with dynamic, newly generated content.
Sharepoint SiteMap Generator – by Tim Dobrinski and Chris Prime
Imtech XML SiteMap - by Waldek Mastykarz
Conclusion:
It’s great to see that there is an open, active and generous SharePoint developers community that offers valuable extensions and features such as these. I can only hope that Microsoft learns and absorbs some of this creativity to provide a more enriching platform in the future.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Hi,
Really great blog post. I am a search analyst and will be working on a project that uses sharepoint for an external site. I have been trying to research this topic of how to make sharepoint seo friendly and it has been difficult to find info about it. Can you recommend any other resources that I can read to get more informed on how to make sure this site is seo friendly?
October 13th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Hi Adelaide,
Glad to hear my post was helpful. Besides the tools I’ve written about here there aren’t too many other (good) SEO tools out there at this point specifically for Sharepoint.
Of course though, as you are probably already finding out in your research the best way to improve your site’s ranking and findability is through good content and best practices in content writing. Introducing these practices into an internal content managers & writers community, in my experience, can be quite a daunting and tedious challenge which will require smart and effective communication tatics.
The Google SEO Starter Guide that I already mentioned is something that is worth distributing as well as incorporating into a companies online content contribution policies & guidelines.
Furthermore, here are some addtional resources you may find interesting:
MOSS SEO by Sean Bordner – http://www.mossseo.com/index.html
An MSDN article on SEO for MOSS 2007:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721591.aspx
Best of luck!
Amir
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