SEO optimizing in Umbraco

Just a few weeks ago, someone showed me woorank, a very cool website analysis tool. Woorank tells you what you can improve on your website to help search engines find and evaluate your content better.

By giving you a score from 0 to 100, you can easily compare your site to others. The score is divided up in dozens of different indicators that all have a certain weight in the calculation of the score. All of the indicators are nicely explained to help you understand why they're there (and if you should care about them).

My site actually scored pretty well (56 at the time). Of course I don't have an entry in wikipedia and my Alexa rank really sucks, so no points there. Fair enough.

I found that I could easily improve my score by tweaking some things in my site, mostly using content that I already had available anyway. Umbraco makes this really, really easy. No programming needed, mostly tweaks to my templates / XSLT files. Here's what I did (and what anybody could do!).

Sitemap

Of course I already have a sitemap on my site thanks to my own fantastically simple sitemap package (it's just a bit of XSLT, really, have you voted yet?).

However, woorank told me that a sitemap was missing. Of course, I have no link to the sitemap anywhere and it's not called sitemap.xml. So I thought I'd find out how to let search engines (and woorank) know that I have one available to crawl.

First of all, you can include a meta tag in the head of your HTML. Easy enough, just add it to the template, but this won't always work. Google, for example, relies on the sitemap being in your robots.txt file. Unfortunately, the robots.txt can't be edited from within Umbraco, so I had to make this improvement by updating it manually.

Microformats

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and StackOverflow fame wrote a blog post in December about making crappy HTML even more crappy by putting extra crappy HTML in it to support microformats. In the end though, he concludes that it's too easy not to do.

I don't really see the added value at the moment, but it can't hurt to implement some of it.

The only microformat that I could think of would make sense on my site was the contact information, using the hCard format. So off I went, added some div's and spans in my footer XSLT and in the HTML on the contact page.

Dublin Core

What's this you ask? I had no idea either. As it turns out Dublin Core meta data is very structured information about the page you're currently on. Although, it seems only slightly better than the normal meta description / keywords tag.

As with the microformats, it doesn't hurt, so I spent 5 minutes updating my main template to include Dublin Core data (title, description, creator & publisher). This data was easily accessible from Umbraco and I'd already used most of it in the other meta tags, so a quick copy & paste in the template did the trick.

Geo Meta Tags

Oh boy, even more meta tags. Alright, geographic information. The content of my site isn't targeted at a specific geographic location, nor does it show any data that belongs to a location. I suppose it's nice to know that I'm in The Hague. Once again, too easy not to do, so I added the placename, region and coordinates to the template.

Conclusion

There is a lot of meta data out there. And apparently, search engines actually look for that information. I do get the impression, though, that there is too many different formats. Can we just pick one and stick with it? Oh wait, it's the web, when has that ever happened?

It took me a few hours to figure out what information was needed everywhere, but once I did, Umbraco made it painless for me to update my entire site using existing data.

This will be even more fun when I start adding the geo information to the site I'm currently working on that shows panorama pictures. Each picture already has GPS coordinates so it'll be a really quick XSLT addition.