Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Definition

Information Science quantifies Search Engines results according to two dimensions:

• Relevancy which is the degree a web pages ranks for the search term. It is visible manifests in terms of the  a search result for a given search phrase.
• Accuracy - of placement for the given search phrase.

SEO is the discipline of maximizing a web site's placement in major search engines for a set of search phrases. Appropriate phrase selection can significantly increase the relevancy of a site to user searches.

From a marketing point of view it is essential that appropriate search terms should lead prospective client to one site and not to its competitors. As search engine page ranking scheme change from time to time and new competitors will try to optimize for competing phrases, one's placement is an ongoing battle with one's peers.

Search Engines claim a moral high ground in obscuring their ranking algorithms, and their penalizing and blacklisting methods. They claim that this practice guarantees the search results that users expect, in terms of accuracy and relevancy. 

However Search engine are provider's of paid listings the search engines and thus have a vested interest in creating a perception of  the value to of paid listing they provide

The methods used in SEO are either internal to the web page or external. For instance placing text into the header is considered internal, but linking to the page from a highly rated web site is external. Another distinction is if a practice is Kosher or likely to get a site banned from a search engine listing. For instance using content only visible to the search engine is considered inappropriate and would get a site black listed.

DotNetNuke and Search Engine Optimization

What is DNN?

DotNetNuke (DNN) is an open-source portal and content management system for ASP.NET. This web site is based on DNN.

Invisible Webs

The Invisible Web is the name given to a widespread phenomenon of content that is unreachable via search engines. Estimates are that the invisible web is six hundred the size of the visibe web. The main causes are:

• Online databases accessible through web forms cannot be effectively indexed by search engines.
• Password protected sites.
• Robot exluding sites.
• blogs or new sites with no links to them that are rarely scanned.

Content managment systems are often challeging to optimize due a mixture of factors.

• lack of search engine friendly urls.
• ineffective usage of html tags.
• internal web site linking. 
• duplicate content.

Although DNN was developed with web marketing in mind, it too is lacking in terms of SEO readiness. For instance DNN supports search engine friendly urls so the a spider can crawl through its pages, however the urls are not human friendly. This has a negative impact on page rank.

Products that can assist in improving web site visiblity:

• HREFExchanger - which rewrites machine frinedly url as human friendly urls.
• L-Space - Google SiteMap  - which generates xml files to assist google in indexing the web site.

 HREFExchanger rewrites the URLs of a site as friendly URLs, such that:

   http://dnn.domain.com/Default.aspx?tabid=109

becomes

   http://dnn.domain.com/contact+us.domain

This is supperior as it contains words the search engine can work with when index and ranking the page, improving its relevancy for your new visitors.

Interoperability Issues

pinkjoint reports an interoperabilty issue between HREFExchanger  amd the The Google SiteMap component which generates an XML file called a Google Sitemap. This file is used by Google to locate the web pages so that the site is fully crawled.

The L-Space Sitemap component is the most expensive for DNN, and also the best. It is the only one that works properly with HREFExchanger, and the support is fantastic. It is worth the extra money.

I have combined these two components on a few DotNetNuke sites, but today I ran across two snags. I was adding HREFExchanger and Google SiteMap to an existing site with multiple portals and it was not working. The SiteMaps came out with only two pages listed and with non-friendly URLs. Using the site as such, the URLs were correct, but not in the SiteMap.

The first problem was due to a false assumption I had made. I assumed that Portal4’s SiteMap would be at http://portal4/GoogleMap.aspx and that Portal5’s would be at http://portal5/GoogleMap.aspx. This turns out not to be the case. The true URL for the sitemap is http://portal4/GoogleMap.aspx?portalID=4. Using this URL solved the first problem, now all of the pages on the portal were listed in the SiteMap. But they did not have friendly URLs.

According to the HREFExchanger site, in a multi-portal site with Google SiteMap, you need to make the following (example) additions to your web.config file:

<hrefExchanger extension=".aspx" w3c-output="transitional">
    <portal portalid="1" extension=".page" w3c-output="none">
        <url path="GoogleMap.aspx" action="filter" />
        <urlpath="images/SomeImage.aspx?getimage=1" action="ignore" />
    </portal>
    <portal portalid="2" extension=".dnn" w3c-output="strict" />
</hrefExchanger>

this is not correct. In a multi-portal site, the line

<url path="GoogleMap.aspx" action="filter" />

should actually read

<url path="GoogleMap.aspx?portalID=1" action="filter" />

Bibliography

1. Moran, M. & Hunt, B. (2005) - Search Engine Marketing Inc - Driving Search Traffic To Your company's Web Site Prentice Hall PTR.
2. Grappone, J. & Couzin, G. (2006) Search Engine Optimization - An Hour A Day Sybex 
3. Kent, P. (2006) SEO For Dummies (2nd Ed) Wiley.
4. Davis, H. (2006) Search Engine Optimization  O'Reilly.

Webligraphy

1. Jay Kay's SEO for DotNetNuke article from the Codeproject.
2. Jay Kay's Duplicate Content Removal article from the Codeproject.
3. Pinkjoint article on HREFExchanger and Google SiteMap interoperability issues.
4. Blogs:
   • www.seomoz.org
   • www.seobook.com

Software