7 essential checks before launching your sitefinity website
TRANSCRIPT
SEO Checklist:
7 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Sitefinity Website
O N L I N E B U S I N E S S P L A T F O R M
Before publishing a new Sitefinity website, you should validate that your pages are aligned with current
best practices in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Sitefinity comes with great out-of-the-box tools that
can be an enormous resource to you when developing your SEO strategy, a critical step if you are to
avoid common SEO mistakes that set efforts back. This article provides a detailed checklist of tasks that
will help maximize your SEO efforts. Complete these before you publish, and your SEO program will be
in good shape.
URLs
Having special characters like '?', or '&' etc. in your URLs can prevent some search engines from indexing all the pages of your
site. Sitefinity generates very clean and highly controllable URLs, not only for its pages, but also for all content items including,
news, blogs, events, custom content types etc. This ensures that every search engine spider will be able to faultlessly crawl and
index all pages from your website.
1
Clean URLs:
Underscores are alpha characters and thus do not separate words.
Dashes are word separators, but should not appear too many times,
or your URL could look spammy to the search engines. While typing
the name of your new page, Sitefinity's URL routing engine will
automatically replace all spaces with dashes so that you'll have only
hyphen-separated words in your URLs (Figure 1). This allows for
optimal indexing and recognition by search engines.
Dashes are better than underscores:
What to check:è Keywords in the URLs are separated by hyphens
è Each URL accurately describes the page
è URLs are no longer than 100 characters Figure 1: Sitefinity's clean, and editable, URL generator.
Page Titles2
Well-written page titles and relevant keywords are extremely
important in SEO. These are the title words displayed in your
search results and they make a big difference, both in getting
found by the browser, and with enticing clicks thereafter. When
writing title tags, remember two important things: 1) make sure the
title tag is unique, and 2) keep the title length below 65 characters,
including spaces. Sitefinity will automatically generate a unique
page title for each of your pages, which you can further modify if
you wish. Before launching your website, be sure you include a
title that both speaks to your customers and the browser.
What to check:è Page titles are set
è Page titles are unique
è Page titles aren't too long (less than 65 characters)
è Page titles don't contain domain names
Figure 2: Use descriptive and relevant titles for each web page.
Descriptions3
The meta description of your page is what end users will see in the search
engine results. It should be very clear, to the point, and describe exactly what
information is on your page. Another SEO best practice is to list keywords for
your page—in order from longest in length to shortest in length, separated by
commas. Sitefinity's page creation form has dedicated fields for both – the
description and keywords. If you have a lot of pages and you're not sure which
ones might be missing page descriptions/ tags, no worries. Sitefinity has a handy
filter capability that allows you to view the pages without descriptions/tags so you
can easily add them in (see Figure 3).
What to check:è Page descriptions are set
è Page descriptions are unique
è Page descriptions don't contain page title
è Page descriptions aren't too long (less than 150
characters)
Figure 3: Filter all pages without set descriptions/tags.
Heading Tags4
Heading tags is one of the most important parts of the SEO checklist. You should only have one H1 tag on your page, and it
should contain the focus keyword. For instance, with our Glacio example in Figures 2 and 3, the page is about a cooling pad.
Consequently, the H1 should be something like “Notebook cooling pad – Glacio.” It's important to make sure that you have one,
and only one, H1 tag. Every other heading on the page should be designated H2, H3 and so on. The Paragraph Dropdown in
the Sitefinity content editor displays a predefined set of heading tags (H1, H2 etc.) by default. This will make the optimization of
your heading tags a piece of cake.
What to check:è Each page has only one H1 tag.
è The H1 tag contains the focus keyword.
Figure 4: Sitefinity built-in content editor, in HTML mode.
Image Alt Tags5
Setting alt tags for images is one of the most common things to forget. However, you can boost your SEO results by adding
optimized alternative text (ALT text) to all your images. It is important to know that this is the only attribute that gets indexed by
search engines for the images. Sitefinity has a very handy and intuitive way to add alternative text to every single image. You'll
also want to make sure you don't have too many images on the page.
What to check:è The pages don't have too many images
è The pages have no images without alt text
Figure 5: Adding Alternative Text (ALT Text) to all images.
Link Anchor Text6
Using the correct words in the anchor text of your links is crucial. Too few
and it won't make a difference. Too many, and you'll have a giant blob of
linked text on your page. You should shoot for 3-4 words that explain
exactly where the link is going to take the user. The anchor text
management in Sitefinity is very intuitive. All you have to do is to select
the desired text in the content editor and click on the Hyperlink Manager
button. Then you can make the selected text (anchor text) a link to an
external web address, or to a page from your site.
What to check:è The anchor text of your links describe the content of the page it's
pointing to
è The anchor text isn't too short
è The anchor text isn't too long (about 3-4 words)
Figure 6: Inserting anchor text in Sitefinity.
Install Webmaster Tools7
Google & Bing as search giants know how to help site owners and webmasters approach search indexing. These services are
normally free and easy to configure. Once you have verified your site, these tools will give you access to all sorts of information
such as timed out URLs, unreachable URLs, not found pages, etc. It's important to install these before you launch your website,
or shortly thereafter. Once you have created your webmaster tools accounts, you'll need to generate and submit a XML sitemap
of your website. It just so happens that there is a fantastic free Sitemap generator plug-in for Sitefinity available on the
marketplace.
What to check:è Create a new Google/Bing Account
è Install Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools
è Check the Webmaster Tools for 404 / 500 errors, duplicate content, missing titles
è Use a tool to find broken links (e.g. )
è Submit a XML sitemap in the Webmaster Tools using the Sitefinity
Xenu
Sitemap generator plug-in
At Sitefinity, we understand that SEO can be frustrating and expensive. That is why we equipped our CMS with great out-of-the-
box tools to help the process along and empower our users to manage it all themselves. This SEO Checklist is yet another
resource for all those webmasters wandering in the dense SEO wilderness trying to make sense of it all. No more paying
expensive SEO companies to optimize your websites for you. You can do it all yourself with Sitefinity.
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About Sitefinity
Sitefinity is a modern online business platform which adapts to any business requirement and works
equally well for online marketers, developers and IT managers. Sitefinity is used for all kinds of online
applications from commercial websites to community portals and intranets, and scales effortlessly no
matter the size of your project. Best of all, Sitefinity offers a simple, easy-to-use interface with a
virtually flat learning curve that makes it a delight to use.
Sitefinity powers more than 10,000 websites worldwide with a particularly strong presence in financial
services, government and education. Global brands such as Kraft Foods, Dannon, Magna, BASF, Toyota,
Chevron and Yale School of Management rely on Sitefinity every day.