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.