Search Engine Optimization for SharePoint

1. Search Engine Optimization for SharePoint Ryan McIntyre, MCITP, MCPD Neudesic Practice Director, Portals & Collaboration April 14, 2012

2. Victory Lap- social event "SharePoint Victory Lap" Social Event for SPSLA will be at: 5:30pm to 8pm at Di Piazzas (5205 E. Pacific Coast Hwy, 90804)

3. Core Lines of Business Neudesic started its business providing best of breed consulting services on the Microsoft Platform. As we built trusted partnerships with our customers, we’ve extended our services to hosting and ongoing support and administration. As clients (our partners) began to ask us to do solve similar problems to fill the gap, Neudesic started packaging re-usable IP to save time and money.

4. Search Engine Optimization 101 • Search Engine Optimization == SEO • Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results • This is Art, not Science • http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/seo does not exist!

5. Topics • Public SEO, not SharePoint/FAST search SEO • SharePoint SEO • Real World Deployment Scenarios

6. SEO Lifecycle

7. Business Drives SEO • Business goals change, impacting SEO activities • Keywords & Content must be updated to reflect business goals • Perform necessary keyword research • Interview customers • Research related websites • Research tools

8. How Does SharePoint Help? • Gives the business the tools they need to keep content fresh • Ability to implement custom master pages & page layouts • Flexible Platform

9. How Do We Help SharePoint? • Site structure • Refresh content • “Light” home page • Link structure (rel=“no follow”) • Redirects: 302 (temp) BAD, 301 (perm) GOOD

10. Keywords

11. Robots.txt • AAA TripTik • Tells the crawler what to look at and what to avoid • Review other sites robots.txt, such as sharepoint.microsoft.com • Exclude search results and other non-content pages

12. Sitemap.xml • Tells the crawler which URLs to crawl • Keep up to date…Crawler’s don’t like being lied to!

13. Single Topic Single URL Courtesy of seomoz.org

14. Measure & Evaluate • Webmaster tools (Google & Bing) • Search for “site:www.mysite.com” and review results • IIS SEO Toolkit • Site Analysis Module • Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes Module • Robots Exclusion Module

15. Demo • Webmaster tools • IIS SEO Toolkit

16. Neudesic.com • “Clean” master page • Simple content using CEWP’s & HTML • jQuery / Client Object Model used for asynchronous loading • Keywords surrounding links • News feed on home page frequently updated • Reciprocated links with • No Flash / Silverlight

17. QuickStartOnlineServices.com Microsoft Partner Network Site focusing on Online Services • Light-weight home page (HTML) • News feed on home page • No Flash / Silverlight

18. Resources • Generate Sitemap with PowerShellhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2010/04/13/generate-sharepoint-2010-sitemap-with-windows-powershell.aspx • IIS SEO Toolkithttp://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit • Webmaster Tools • Bing - http://www.bing.com/webmaster • Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ • URL Rewrite Fix for 302 redirectshttp://blog.mastykarz.nl/sharepoint-redirects-revisited-301-302/

19. Resources (cont) • SharePoint SEO Code Packages • Meta-tag management: http://blog.mastykarz.nl/easy-editing-meta-tags-publishing-pages-mavention-meta-fields/ • Meta-tag, Title, & Dynamic List/Library support: http://www.canviz.com/Canviz-Blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=10

20. Ryan McIntyre ryan.mcintyre@neudesic.com http://blog.randomdust.com @ryanmcintyre 303-520-6337

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