The Ultimate SEO Guide for Sitefinity

The great thing about Sitefinity CMS is that it automates some of these processes for you. Progress has some really good documentation on compressing code, reduction of render-blocking javascript by combining requests into a single request, and how Sitefinity handles browser caching. Another helpful resource is Progress' best practices for optimizing performance located in the Sitefinity CMS documentation.

Tools to Test Page Speed and Performance

There are some great tools to test page speed. One is Google Page Speed Insights. Another one that we use at Smooth Fusion is called GTmetrix (http://gtmetrix.com/). 

Optimize Images

As mentioned above, the size of images on a web page will impact how fast that page loads. Although Sitefinity v.13 allows you to edit an image even after it's been uploaded, you still need to make sure images are compressed and you should experiment with the quality settings on your photos before you upload.

Reducing Image File Size

Before uploading an image to Sitefinity, make sure the file size is manageable. You can use a program like Photoshop or if you use a Mac, you can go to 'resample image' in the image preview app and edit the resolution there. 

There are a few free online tools out there to easily compress your images: 

• TinyPNG 
• ImageOptimizer

Create Accurate and Concise URLs

URL structure and naming are other helpful ways to increase SEO by providing both Google and users a way to tell what the page is about. Since it's a minor ranking factor, Google doesn't put as much weight on ranking high in search results but it's still relevant and important. Don't make your URLs too long with a lot of extra characters in them but make sure it's simple and readable while providing context to what the page is about. 

When possible, place content on the same subdomain to preserve authority. You see this a lot with blogs. Sitefinity can be built to include a blog so make sure you take advantage of that instead of pointing to another blog publishing website with a different subdomain. You're losing a lot of domain ranking authority for your site if you don't have your blog on your site. 

Example:

• Recommended: https://example.com/blog 
• Less ideal: https://blog.example.com  

Utilize Additional/Friendly URLs

In Sitefinity, you can add additional URLs in the page title and properties section. You may have one URL that you wanted because it was simple for internal use but for SEO purposes you may want to add an additional URL that includes more specific keywords. 

These URLs can also be useful if you want to create a very simple URL for a marketing campaign but you want the page URL to be a little longer and more descriptive. 

Set Up Custom Error Pages

Web server issue codes, called HTTP status codes, communicate a wide variety of responses back to your browser. Many of these codes are just reporting that everything is OK. But there are some HTTP status codes that report errors. The most well-known is the 404 code that is returned when a web page cannot be found.  

A 404 error can occur if a user misspells a URL. But it also happens when a user clicks a link to a page that has moved or no longer exists. For example, suppose another website includes a link to a page or blog post on your site and you delete that page or blog post. When a user of that other site clicks that link, it will now link to an address that no longer exists. By default, the 404 code that results will cause an unattractive and unhelpful page to appear on your user's browser. 

How to Create a 404 Custom Error Page

It is a best practice to provide a custom page to appear when a 404 error occurs. This custom error page should include your branding so that the user knows they have arrived on the right site. Since website performance is so much about user experience, custom error pages help by providing users a way to find the content they were looking for that for some reason they couldn't get to because of an error. Custom error pages are important for SEO because without them your user will end up with an error page that makes it appear that your website is not up and running. Sitefinity CMS has documentation on how to enable custom error pages, map error codes to custom error pages, and create the error pages. There's also more information on the supported error codes and other helpful info on custom error pages. 

When creating a 404 page, make it fun and creative while providing links to some of the top pages on your site. Below is the custom 404 page that appears on our Smooth Fusion website. 

Don't Forget about Page Redirects (301s and 302s)

When you're rebuilding your website, it's a great time to reconsider changing the URL names if your old URLS don't have any descriptive keywords. With 301 redirects you don't have to worry about keeping the same URLs from your old site, it gives your team the opportunity to rethink the naming and structure with the rebuild.

Examples:

New blog URL: www.website.com/blog

When creating any piece of content on your Sitefinity site, it's important to make sure it's created using these on-page SEO best practices.  Creating pages that are valuable, well-organized, and are readable by people and search engines is a key focus for improving this type of SEO.

Create Pages with Valuable and Informative Content 

Arguably the most important thing you can do to improve your SEO (in general) is to create content that is valuable for your audience.  The content on your site should answer customer questions related to your industry, product, or service.

You do want to include keywords and phrases that people are searching for but you don't want to stuff your content with a bunch of keywords, also known as keyword stuffing. This used to be effective in the early days of search engines, but search engines are smarter, and now they look for well-written, informative, and valuable content that will satisfy the user's search queries. 

Create Personalized User Experiences for Your Users

If you really want to add value for visitors to your website, then personalization is the way to go.  Not only does it improve the experience someone has on your site, but it also increases engagement and decreases page drop rates, which can help your page rank higher in search engines. 

Sitefinity can be personalized using Sitefinity Insight and other tools like HubSpot and Zapier. We did an entire  video series on personalizing pages in Sitefinity using Hubspot. 

Create a Blog

As a marketer, it is up to you to determine the specific type of content that would be valuable to your customers but there are content types that can be more valuable than others, one of those being blogs. Blog content is extremely valuable for SEO and is one of the best ways to add value to your website on a continual basis. When writing a blog post, you should focus on being informative and answering questions that your audience is asking. Coming up with ideas for blog articles could be as simple as asking your sales team the common questions or complaints they get from your customers.  There are many benefits to adding a blog to your website, but the SEO benefit is among the top reasons you should get writing.    

How to Set-up and Use Blogs in Sitefinity CMS?

Sitefinity has a blog module that can be set-up in your CMS.  To get an overview of the blog module and to learn how to create a blog in Sitefinity, go to the documentation. Once blogs are set-up, you'll see how easy the Sitefinity back-end blog module is to use and in no time you'll be cranking out more content on your site. 

Alt Text on Images

Alt text (alternative text) is a word or phrase that describes the image. Alt-text is not only important to SEO but is very important to visually-impaired users of your site. Because alt text improves accessibility for the visually impaired and for people with slow internet connections, Google places a high value on alt text, which makes alt text important for your ranking. 

Alt text on images should be unique to the image and describe what the image is. Since search engines can't tell what's in the graphic (at least not yet), they use the alt-text to read the image. So alt text can also help your SEO based on the quality of the description.  

In Sitefinity, alt text on images can be edited in image properties. You can access Image properties by going to the top navigation in your dashboard, to Content dropdown, and select Image. Select the image you want to update. Once selected, the image properties will open to edit. You can also add the alt text once you upload an image on Sitefinity. 

Page Title, Meta Description, and Other Page Elements 

It's important when creating a page in Sitefinity that you don't leave any of these fields blank. 

Page Title Tags

Page title tags are important because they provide search engines with guidance on what the page is about. Page title tags should be between 50-60 characters and your most important keywords should be near the beginning. Also, it's what users see in search results, so well-written descriptions can be the deciding factor for someone clicking on your page or not.  

In Sitefinity, you can set the Page Title in 'Titles and Properties' while in the page editor. It's important to note that the Name of your page is separate from the page title that will show in search. The page name will be what shows in your site's navigation, on the top of your page content, and is used to identify the page in your Sitefinity CMS backend. How it's set-up on our  Sitefinity Maintenance page is the page name also acts as the H1 tag, so it's important to give it a name that describes what the page is about. 

The field that is important for SEO purposes is called Title, which will be what search engines use to display the page in search results. It's important for this title to be descriptive and include your best keywords. 

Meta Description Tag

Your pages meta description, which provides a brief summary of a web page, is another important component to SEO. It should be between 50 and 150 characters and be unique for each page and include descriptive keywords. 

In Titles and Properties, there is also a section for Description and Keywords. Keywords used to be an important component of solid SEO but aren't as important anymore. But it's important you fill out the description field when setting up a page in Sitefinity. Sitefinity will notify you when you've exceeded the 150 character mark. 

Use Heading Tags Correctly on all Pages

Heading tags should be used on all your pages. Just like a heading in a book or article you read, it tells Google and the user what they are about to read or the content they are about to consume. Headings should also be used to guide your users through the text on your web page. People reading text online are more likely to scan than read the entire article. Adding headings throughout your pages increases the chance of a user to pause scanning and start reading.

Like alt text, headings also improve accessibility on your site for the visually impaired people who use screen readers. The headings allow the screen reader to understand the structure of the content, which allows the user to navigate the content to the part they wish to listen to. Giving your users a better experience on your site is an overall good practice that leads to better SEO.

Heading Tags go from Heading 1 to Heading 6 and are typically ordered by size and importance. Heading 1 (H1) is the main heading of your piece of content and should provide a good summary of what your article or page content is about. On a blog article, this would typically be the title. H2 tags (heading 2) are like the chapters in a book. They relate to heading 1 (or the title of the book) but are subcategories. Within those subcategories, you may need to get even more specific, that's when heading 3's and 4's come into play. 

It is not enough to have headings in your content, you must have the heading tags in the HTML code. A number 1 heading tag would look like <h1> in the HTML code. 

How to Quickly Audit your Heading Tags on a Sitefinity Page

If you're in the backend of your CMS, you can quickly do this by going to the page editor, clicking on the title, and seeing what heading type was chosen in the formatting tools. But if you don't have access to do this or you want a much faster way to see how your headings are set on a specific page of your site then you can use a tool like SEOquake. This is a tool that we use to quickly check the overall SEO health of a page. I would suggest downloading the Chrome browser extension so you can get the most out of it. 

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is important, but out of the three, there's not much you can do in Sitefinity to control it. It is because these are your site's external ranking factors like external links from other sources. You may have heard the term "link building". This is a big component of off-page SEO.  

How Does Off-Page SEO Work?

Search engines aren't just looking for content pages that are valuable, but also content that is trustworthy, popular, and reputable. The way they determine this is by how many links are coming from reputable sources on the internet. Often times, bloggers, influencers, and news publications reference specific pieces of content in their own articles. The authors of these articles may not be the industry experts of the piece they are writing, but they reference those who are.  The best way to get these links is to create really great pieces of content and rank high so that others will find it and hopefully reference it. 

Although getting high-quality links from reputable sources will have more "weight", Social media sharing can improve off-page SEO by providing external links to your site.  Sharing on social media is a good way to get your content in front of people. As we discussed above in the technical SEO section, enabling OG tags is a good place to start so that readers can easily share your content on social. 

Off-page SEO isn't just about links, but we won't go into those things here since the point of this post was to show how to implement SEO tactics in your Sitefinity CMS, and as we said, there is not much you can do in Sitefinity to control it.  But if you are looking for an in-depth overview of off-page SEO, then check out Neil Patel's, Ultimate Guide to Off-Page SEO.