If you are an online business owner, then you must have come across some of the most popular CMSs that are needed to develop a functional and rich website. Umbraco is a popular open source.NET based CMS platform that helps to manage your web content with great ease and offers remarkable features that can make the site user and search engine friendly. It is also a smart solution that offers mobile platform specific websites with content that can be delivered to android, iPhone and Windows phone seamlessly, while you only need to maintain only a single set of content for both mobile and desktop based sites.
Today, websites have to be search engine friendly as it helps to gain a higher ranking in the SERPs and help to attract a wide range of audience. Here in this article, we will discuss some basic functionalities that your website should have in order to optimize it for the search engines.
The basic page settings:
Every Umbraco website should easily manage the SEO drivers that are basic like the page title, meta descriptions and meta keywords. This is easy to do and there should be some text boxes allowing you to set them. This will help the SEO experts to check the correct length of the title and the description and check whether it is too long or too short. All these fields should be available on every search engine facing page so that the site administrator can easily set the basic SEO.
Sitemaps and robots:
Managing the sitemap and the robots.txt file can be a difficult process, especially if the entire thing is done manually. While running multi-sites from a single Umbraco installation, it can become difficult to manage separate robots.txt files or sitemap.xml. To make this easy, the setup should be made page by page so as to manage content and auto generate the files.
Scripts:
One of the most important things that dedicated Umbraco developers should consider for the search engines is to set things like Google Analytics, Tag Manager and etc. These type of scripts are likely to fall under two categories, page level and global scripts. The scripts should be in any one of the three places like the HEAD of the page, the BODY tag and the closing BODY tag. This can be done by having the SEO setting node that contains the three text fields, one for each script location, other an SEO tab on your page DocTypes and add the three fields so that they can set the scripts at a page level too.
Canonical URLS:
You may often see the same page on various URLs as Google treats them as unique. So, it is always a good idea to standardize the URLS and redirect the others to the main page of your Umbraco website. To achieve this, you can either use the URLRewriting.Net component that comes with Umbraco or use the URL Rewriting plug.