Getting Started: SEO for SharePoint

I completed a bit of research on SEO for SharePoint lately.  The results were pretty much expected considering my experience in the field. 

As early as 2004 I was involved in a project on MCMS 2002 where we needed to build a metadata panel into the authoring experience.  The metadata panel gave the author the ability to enter metadata which, upon save, was written in the <meta/> tags for the HTML page.  Credit for this brainchild has to go to Brian Fernandes, my mentor as a young developer.

So in MOSS 2007, MCMS2002 and SPS2003 effectively merged.  I was pretty excited about this and I was expecting some additions to the CMS functionality also.  A number of changes were made, but something that was fundamentally missing was the ability to prepare pages for SEO via the interface.

Waldek Mastykarz one of the names that popped up most in my research has a number of great articles on the topic.  To assist with the terrible naming in MOSS 2007 he created Imtech SharePoint SEO Slugs.  Have a look at the description here – Imtech SharePoint SEO Slugs.’  Waldek wrote a number of other articles that discussing SEO for MOSS 2007 and I recommend reading his blog if you’re still using the 2007 version of the product.

Another great link is Waldek’s starter guide for SharePoint 2007 and Google SEO – Google SEO Starter Guide for MOSS 2007.

Let’s move to SEO for SharePoint 2010 shall we?

Before jumping into how to get started with SEO for SharePoint 2010 I thought it would be pertinent to understand the core principles of SEO (agnostic of platform). 

What is SEO?

I used the following article as a great reference – http://chasesagum.com/15core-principles-seo.  Thank you Chase Sagam.  The highlight of this post is point number 10 – Remarkable Content is King.  Enough said.

What tools are available?

In terms of tools, you have to start at the Free SEO Toolkit.  This toolkit plugs directly into IIS and helps with things like broken pages, page load times, incorrect markup and more.  This tool is meant to be used in an on-going basis to review to tweak your site as more and more content is added.  Resources on the tool can be found here -http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo

What about SharePoint & Products?

Quite simply put, SharePoint 2010 doesn’t ship with out of the box functionality which will help you write your tags into the correct for format for search bots.  For this to happen you either have to (A) develop your own utility or (B) use one that has already been developed. 

Enter Mavention Meta Fields

From what I could find online Mavention Meta Fields seems like a great solution to the SEO “challenge” in SharePoint.  The add-on utility allows the author to edit the meta tags not only for SharePoint, but for the page also.  The functionality works 100% like the utility I was involved in for MCMS 2002 many moons ago.

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/easy-editing-meta-tags-publishing-pages-mavention-meta-fields/

Summary

SEO tools and utilities alone will not get your site ranked better on the web.  The day and age of creating a million back links, registering your site on search engines et al are gone.  As per Chase Sagums 10 core principles, I believe that the key elements all web authors need to concentrate on would be “Creating Remarkable Content”.

Here are some other links that I used in my research, enjoy:

http://www.glynblogs.com/2010/07/generate-a-sitemap-for-sharepoint-2010-using-powershell.html – Glyn Clough

http://www.wssdemo.com/livepivot/ – WSSDEMO crew

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/how-we-did-it-mavention-nl-part-3-search-engine-optimization/ – Waldek Masykarz

http://www.thesharepointmuse.com/2011/12/lesson-learned-when-you-need-to-use-publishing-in-sharepoint/ – Marcy Keller

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg430141.aspx – Randy Drisgill (I consider him the ultimate branding Ninja on SharePoint)

Huge list of SharePoint WCM web sites

This is pretty neat. Ian Morrish has put together a list of web sites built using SharePoint WCM. Check out the screenshots from his top 100 here, or see the full list of more than 300 sites.

Optimizing Performance with SharePoint WCM

“A significant issue you face with a WCM site is that the SharePoint page processing pipeline adds a lot of extra weight to the page payload—or page size—by adding certain default files such as core.js, core.css, init.js, and ie55up.js, which can add approximately 500 KBs uncompressed to the original page size. These extra KBs can add up to 10–20 seconds of download time on slower connections and can make the site performance unacceptable.“

Read more…

MOSS content management check-out errors

SharePoint 2007 has totally integrated SharePoint 2003 and MCMS 2002 to create a wonderful content management experience.  However, the error messages it displays are not always as helpful as one would expect. Here is an example:

“This item must be checked out before its properties can be edited.”

Now this might seem pretty simple as you’re reading it, but trust me, while you are editing the page, this error is pretty confusing due to the fact that the editing toolbar – which contains all the required information – isn’t always shown by default.

Basically, whenever you see this message it means that the page has been checked out by someone else.  The easiest way to see who has it checked out is to call up the Editing Toolbar by clicking on “Site Actions –> Show Editing Toolbar“.  The green bar that appears will clearly note exactly who has it checked out.  There you can interact with the relevant user via LCS, or if you have administrative rights, override the checkout and work from there.

Showing Progress in SharePoint via Code

Here’s an interesting post on how to show an “Operation in Progress” page in SharePoint from code.