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
August 19th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Thank you very much for the valuable information
August 20th, 2011 at 4:39 am
You {can|could} {definitely|certainly} see your {enthusiasm|expertise|skills} {in the|within the} {paintings|work} you write. {The arena|The world|The sector} hopes for {more|even more} passionate writers {like you|such as you} who {aren’t|are not} afraid {to mention|to say} how they believe. {Always|All the time|At all times} {go after|follow} your heart.
August 23rd, 2011 at 8:46 pm
I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. cheers
August 24th, 2011 at 4:53 am
How do I start my own website about fantasy sports?
September 10th, 2011 at 12:57 am
Attractive section of content. I just stumbled upon your blog and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Any way I will be subscribing to your feeds and even I achievement you access consistently rapidly.
September 20th, 2011 at 11:24 am
when I attend about website we Love us for your very bestnews. I will save its.
October 23rd, 2011 at 7:40 am
excellent post, very informative. I’m wondering why the opposite experts of this sector don’t realize this. You must proceed your writing. I’m confident, you have a huge readers’ base already!
November 4th, 2011 at 6:50 am
Nice blog right here! Additionally your website so much up very fast! What host are you using? Can I am getting your affiliate hyperlink in your host? I wish my site loaded up as quickly as yours lol
November 18th, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Excellent beat ! I wish to apprentice at the same time as you amend your site, how could i subscribe for a blog site? The account aided me a acceptable deal. I have been tiny bit familiar of this your broadcast offered shiny clear concept
November 20th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Someone necessarily assist to make significantly posts I would state. This is the first time I frequented your web page and up to now? I surprised with the research you made to create this particular submit amazing. Wonderful activity!
November 21st, 2011 at 7:58 am
Definitely imagine that that you said. Your favourite justification appeared to be on the web the simplest factor to understand of. I say to you, I definitely get annoyed while other folks think about concerns that they plainly don’t understand about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and also defined out the entire thing with no need side-effects , other people can take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks
November 26th, 2011 at 10:54 am
You really make it appear so easy along with your presentation however I in finding this matter to be really one thing which I feel I’d by no means understand. It kind of feels too complicated and extremely vast for me. I am taking a look forward in your subsequent post, I’ll attempt to get the hold of it!
November 29th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Are you having an issue with spammers comment spamming on your blog? Click http://is.gd/BrNJlt for the solution.
December 8th, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Your site is pretty interesting to me and your subject matter is very relevant. I was browsing around and came across something you might find interesting. I was guilty of 3 of them with my sites. “99% of blog owners are doing these five mistakes”. http://tinyurl.com/cwa3tj7 You will be suprised how easy they are to fix.
December 11th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
I just couldn’t depart your web site prior to suggesting that I really loved the usual information an individual provide to your guests? Is gonna be again steadily to inspect new posts
December 11th, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Hi there, I found your site by way of Google while looking for a related topic, your site got here up, it seems to be good. I’ve added to favourites|added to my bookmarks.
December 13th, 2011 at 6:06 am
Just wanted to thank you for a really good post. I found it quite useful and will check your site often.
December 17th, 2011 at 6:43 am
hello!,I like your writing so so much! percentage we communicate extra approximately your post on AOL? I need a specialist on this area to resolve my problem. Maybe that is you! Having a look ahead to peer you.
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:50 am
Fantastic beat ! I wish to apprentice at the same time as you amend your website, how could i subscribe for a weblog web site? The account helped me a acceptable deal. I have been a little bit acquainted of this your broadcast provided vibrant clear concept
January 12th, 2012 at 5:33 am
Thanks for this blog. It gives lot of information. It’s interesting for website promotion.
January 14th, 2012 at 7:30 am
Search engine optimization (seo ) is a crucial portion of any prosperous web site, yet have you any idea your own search engine marketing fundamentals as well as you ought to allow me to share leading 7 …skyscraper seo
January 14th, 2012 at 9:09 am
Very informational. Starters need to get a hold of this site to learn SEO the right way from the creation of the website up to launching it live.
January 21st, 2012 at 10:29 pm
Oh my goodness! an amazing article dude. Thanks Nevertheless I’m experiencing difficulty with ur rss . Don�t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anyone getting similar rss problem? Anyone who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx