Infosys | Microsoft

One of most common way users find the site is using Search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo. The users search using the keywords and if they are related to your site, your sites should appear in the Search Results. Higher ranking in the search results will increase the probability of the customer navigating to your site. More traffic to the site translates into more opportunities to monetize and increase the revenue. Although different search engines have different ranking algorithms, all the sites need to be crawled if they need to be displayed in the Search Results.

If the sites need to be available as one of the top results, the site needs to be optimized from the search engine perspective. This is different from optimizing the Site search which the customers can leverage once they are in the Site and look for specific information within the site.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010 is becoming the Digital Marketing Platform for various companies. Sites created using out of the box components in SharePoint are not fully SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly. SharePoint 2010 is more SEO friendlier as compared to MOSS 2007.

The relevancy of the site can be improved in different ways. Some things which need to be kept in mind during the development and content creation of the web sites in SharePoint are as follows (most of these apply to non-SharePoint sites also)

1. Allow authors to add keywords to pages that gets added to the keyword metatag of the Page
2. Add the description of the page into the corresponding metatag of the Page
3. Make sure that author provides the title for every page and it is present within the Title Tag in the rendered Page
4. Have meaningful Page names
5. Prepare Sitemap.xml with all the key links that needs to be crawled and update it regularly. This can be generated by a Tool or via PowerShell for SharePoint
6. Generate Robots.txt file with the list of directories which need to excluded from Search engines (http://websiteURL/robots.txt)
7. Avoid using images for navigation controls. Always use simple, readable text which the search spiders can crawl
8. Avoid using nested tables in HTML. Make sure that all custom Web parts, custom controls, Master Pages and Page Layouts are XHTML complaint (Many out of the box controls and Pages in SharePoint are not fully XHTML complaint)
9. Avoid any inline Styles. Always refer to a separate CSS files
10. Avoid inline Scripts. Always refer to external jQuery and Java scripts files
11. Avoid unnecessary redirections within the Site
12. Semantic URLs would help. Leverage URL rewriter (http://www.microsoft.com/web/spotlight/urlrewriter/)

NOTE: The list is not a comprehensive list. 

There are many tools in the market that helps evaluate the web sites for their friendliness with the search engines. SEO Toolkit from Microsoft is a free download that gets integrated with IIS 7. It analysis the site from Search engine optimization perspective and provides the recommendations to improve the relevance of the web site in the search results in major search engines.  More information regarding the functionality of the Tool is available at http://www.microsoft.com/web/spotlight/seo.aspx .

I think every project that is developing web sites especially on Microsoft Stack (ASP.NET, SharePoint, and IIS) should start leveraging this tool to make their site Search Engine Optimized.

Please follow the URL http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/368-SEO-Toolkit for details regarding other Tools in SEO space.