Tips to Make Your Umbraco Website SEO Friendly

Gaining a higher website visibility is the first step that you should consider if you want to be successful in your online business. But with latest technologies changing every now and then, keeping pace with the changing landscape may at times become a difficult task. Today, website owners are using various CMS platforms to have complete control on the web content and its publishing and Umbraco is a popular CMS that is used by organizations.

SEO plays a vital role in attracting traffic to the site and Umbraco development can be setup easily to do the best job of managing SEO. Here in this blog, I will discuss some of the basic features that your website should have to make SEO manageable and performing.

Basics:

Every Umbraco website should have some basic features and functionalities that should be able to manage the basic SEO drives that includes meta keywords, meta description, title and etc. This is easy to do and needs only few text boxes that permits you to set the title, keywords and descriptions. Some validation features can also be added to them that will quickly show the user if the description and title are of the correct length.

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XML sitemap:

Your Umbraco development website should have an XML sitemap, which should list all the pages of the site that should be visible on the search engines. The thank you page is also important. Having a sitemap helps the spiders to find the web pages that may not be directly accessible via the navigation. It can also be used in combination with things like the SEO tools and any other Webmaster tools. The standard location of the sitemap is sitemap.xml, but this can be customized as long as the Robots.txt files are linked.

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Robots.txt:

Your Umbraco website should have a robot.txt file in the root of the site that describes what is and what isn’t allowed. The site owners use this to give instructions about their site to the web robots. But while using the robot.txt files, here are a few important considerations.

• Robots can ignore your robots.txt specially the malware robots that usually scan the web for vulnerabilities and security loopholes
• The robots.txt file is publicly available and anyone can see the sections of the server that you don’t want the robots to use.

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Canonical URLs:

These URLs are very valuable to the search engines and if you have multiple URLs that reflect the same content, then these tags help to tell the search engines to treat these pages as the canonical URL or the URLs that are preferred for the tracking purpose. Even though the pages are all the same, Google will treat them as unique URLs. So, it is a good idea to canonicalize your URLs across the board and 301 redirect the others to the main one. In order to do this, you can use the UrlRewriting.Net component that comes with Umbraco.

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Redirects:

Suppose you are creating a new version of your website and the structure of the site has changed and if you have not set up the redirects for the old URLs, then the inbound links that are using the old URLs will 404 and this will have a negative impact on the SEO rankings. It is always a good idea to use redirects in Umbraco development If you move a page or delete one or even rename it, you should have a means of tracking them and setting up the redirects. The 301 URLs Tracker is an awesome package that helps you to manage the redirects.

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Scripts:

One of the most important tasks of SEO agencies is the ability to set things like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and whatever switching script is at present the latest. The most popular types of script that you would want to set usually fall under two categories:  page level for e.g. conversion scripts and the global scripts for e.g. Google Analytics. The scripts are usually placed in, the HEAD of the page, after the starting of the opening BODY tag and before the closing of the BODY tag. This can be easily done by having a global SEO setting node having three text fields, each for the script locations.

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SEO Checker:

There are some commercial packages called the SEO Checker that you can purchase for your site. It performs well and also contains some additional useful features and functionalities that includes the ability to run SEO checks on pages and also check for any broken inbound links and many more. It is not very costly, but helps to add various functionalities to keep your site well optimized.

“Thus, in a nutshell, making your website SEO friendly doesn’t have to be a painful task. With a bit of planning and careful implementation, you can now have an Umbraco site that will perform well with the search engines.”