Here, at Ta Da! Solutions, we work with a lot of marketing agencies and are continually adding features to improve SEO functionality on sites.  We also see a lot of sites developed by other development companies that don't give much thought to SEO.  

We've had a lot of "rescue projects" brought to us by clients frustrated that they can't manage their SEO functionality.  These clients often blame Umbraco for having poor SEO functionality.  This isn't true.  Umbraco can be setup pretty easily to do a great job managing SEO.  We'll cover some of the basic functionality that your site should have to make search engine optimation easier to manage.

1.  The Basics

At a minimum, every site should be able to easily manage the basic SEO drivers - page title, meta keywords and meta description.

This is really easy to do.  There should be a few text boxes that allow you to set the page title, meta keywords, and meta description.  As a nice bonus, we added some validation to quickly show the user when the title and description are the correct length, too long, or too short. 

These fields should be available on every user or search engine facing page to allow the site administrators to easily set these SEO basics.

2.  Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are valuable to search engines.  If you have multiple urls that show the show content, these tags tell the search engines to treat these pages as the canonical url, or the preferred url for tracking purposes.

We add a few fields to every site to make managing canonical urls easier.

Globally, we add a site setting that allows users to set the "Canonical Domain Name" for a given site.  For example, many sites can be accessed by http://site.com, http://www.site.com, https://site.com, and https://www.site.com, or http://site.com and http://sitealias.com.  This setting allows the user to define the preferred domain to use for all canonical urls.  We usually add this setting on the homepage node in a "Site Settings" or "Global" tab.

This is used to prefix all pages on our website as being sourced from https://www.tadasolutions.com.

We also add a page by page setting to manage the canonical url.  This can be either a relative url, i.e. treat this page as /blog-umbraco-seo/, or an absolute url, i.e. treat this page as https://www.tadasolutionsblog.com/blog-umbraco-seo/.

This allows our customers and/or their SEO team to easily set the canonical urls on a page by page basis.

Note that some of the examples above can be better resolved via url redirects instead of canonicals.  This will be covered in more detail in the SEO Redirects.

3.  Robots and sitemaps

Managing the sitemap, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt file can be a tedious process, especially if it's done manually.  In multi-site installations (running multiple websites from a single Umbraco installation), it can be difficult to manage separate sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.  

To make this management easy, we setup page by page settings to manage this content and autogenerate these files.  For clients that don't want less functionality, this might be managed by a single Umbraco page setting.  For clients that want more control, we've setup the following functionality.

Regardless of the approach, we autogenerate the robots.txt, sitemap, and xml sitemap based on Umbraco page by page settings.  We additionally provide a "Robots Meta Option" to allow our clients to manage the index and follow options for each page.

4.  SEO Redirects

We like to add a few SEO redirects to each site, to help with url standardization and preferred urls.  We recommend the following:

• Preferred domain name
  This IIS redirect rule, rewrites all requests from http://sitename.com to http://www.sitename.com.    

    <rule name="Canonical host name" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url="(.*)" />
        <conditions>
           <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^sitename\.com$" />
        </conditions>
        <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.sitename.com/{R:0}" />
      </rule> 

• Add trailing slash
  This forces any urls such as www.site.com/example to be redirected to www.site.com/example/
  

    <rule name="Add trailing slash" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url="(.*[^/])$" ignoreCase="true" />
         <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^/umbraco/" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^/bundles/" negate="true" />
        </conditions>
         <action type="Redirect" redirectType="Permanent" url="{R:1}/" />
      </rule> 

5.  Packages we like and final thoughts

A few packages that we've found helpful with SEO

• Rank One SEO Toolkit - this is a great dashboard to help basic users gain more insight into their page SEO
• Toggle Box and Slider - this is a nice alternative to a true/false or yes/no checkbox.  It also includes a nice slider that we use for xml sitemap priority
• Umbraco 7.5 Redirect URL Management - this was a great addition to Umbraco that was added in v7.5.0.  This new module automatically tracks and writes 301s for page renames and moves.  It's great automatic functionality that's built in that we used to manage via other nice tools like the 301 URL Tracker

 As a final wrap, this is by no means an exhaustive list of SEO functionality for Umbraco.  We didn't touch on subjects like header tags (h1, h2, h3,...), image alt text or titles, social meta tags, and other functionality that might be a great addition for your site.  If you'd like to add more SEO functionality to your site or discuss SEO options, feel free to reach out to us today.