A lot of the content that I write on here tends to be quite technical in detail.   Lately I’ve had quite a lot of requests for information from non-technical people for help with their DotNetNuke sites.   So this entry is aimed at everyone who has ever clicked the ‘Edit’ option in a DNN site.

Here’s an example Google SERP for this site, from the search phrase ‘DotNetNuke SEO Urls’

The three fields that need careful consideration are these:

1)      Page Title

2)      Page Description

3)      Page Url

Each of these items must work together in the SERP to turn eyeballs into clicks. This is especially important if you aren’t number 1 in the results page. The number 1 result gets the majority of the clicks – but if the number 1 position doesn’t have the information the person wants – then they start scanning the rest of the list. This is where your SERP result needs to stand above the others and be a click-magnet.

Keywords and Phrasing

The choice of keywords is obvious – if you don’t have the right keywords, you aren’t going to rank highly.  But in this case a human is going to read the keyword and decide if the link should be clicked.   You need to find ways of stuffing the right keywords into the result without making it look like you stuffed keywords into the result. Experiment with phrasing, and punctuation separators like ‘-‘, ‘|’, ‘~’ and others. I personally prefer to use a hyphen where possible.

Use action words in your descriptions, titles and Urls, where possible. It’s a good idea to include an action word (that’s a verb to you and me) if the page has a specific action. Try words like ‘Download’, ‘Watch’, ‘Listen’, ‘Register’. More generic pages with an action like ‘read’ should probably just stick to describing the content. 

And don’t forget the adjectives – ‘Free’ is about the best one for getting visitors clicking, but even words like ‘Huge’, ‘Expert’ and others will help. Then put in your nouns and keywords – and put it all together. Here are some examples:

Download Free Programs – better than ‘Programs’

Watch Expert Techniques – better than ‘Videos’

Search Huge Range – better than ‘Search’

Learn Latest Methods – better than ‘Tutorials’.

These phrases can be used in the Title, Description and Url – wherever they fit the best for your particular page.

This is a subjective topic, but personally I have a rule about making my links look simple and easy. By simple, I mean making the Url as short as can be achieved, and by making it a simple Html document.   PDF’s contain all types of interesting content, but it takes a while to load the adobe reader, then you can’t easily navigate around the document. 

The same goes for search queries. Don’t make your result then go to another search box or similar. That’s why the person was using a search engine in the first place – to find results, not more searches.

With those factors in mind, let’s look at optimizing the three fields we are concentrating on.

This doesn’t need to be a sentence, but try and run the keywords together to make a group of short phrases. I try and put my brand name into the page title, but you may not need to do this. If the person was after your brand name, they’d just search on it. In my case, I’m probably better off just concentrating on the common phrases people search on to get to my product: like ‘DotNetNuke SEO Url Product – Create Search Friendly Urls’. I generally go over the 60-70 characters Google shows in the SERP – usually to use more keywords. However, I make sure the first 60 characters shows a readable phrase with the primary keywords for the page.

You need to concentrate more on keywords than on action in the Page Title. It’s known that the page title carries weight in search engine rankings – probably because there is a finite amount of space for a title, so you have to choose your keywords carefully.

Where to Change the Value

The page title is configured in the page settings screen, using the ‘Page Title’ field. It is generated in the Html section, as

The biggest mistake is to leave the name of the portal in the Page Title.   You should be choosing a specific title for the specific page. Another common mistake is to show the business or organization name as the first half of the page title. ‘Widget Maker Limited of Widgetsville’ is only useful on the ‘About Widget Maker’ page.   On the page for Widgets, it should be more like ‘Purchase Widget Product Here’, or ‘Get Widget Product Details’.

Page Description

The page Description won’t always be display in a search engine like Google. If Google decides your page content contains a better phrase match than the description of the page, it will show a short excerpt from the page showing the keyword/phrase matching.   The best way to avoid this is to make sure your description uses the chosen keywords for the page. 

The primary objective with the Page Description is to show your action for the page. If the page is to download a product trial, then make sure it says so.   If the page contains information about your products, then say so. If the page contains contact information, you should be starting the Page description with ‘Get contact details for Xyz company, including phone number, street address and contact emails’.

Don’t make it too long, and don’t keep it to short, either. A one-line entry may not make your result stand out enough – but putting too much information will only result in it being truncated. If you’ve got the copy writing skills to make it sound enticing at the ‘cut-off’ point, then go for it – the rest of us should stick to one or two sentences, and try and keep it to 150 characters or so.

Where to Change the Value

The Page Description is in ‘Page Settings’, in the field ‘Description’.  In the output Html, it is in the section, contained in

Common Mistakes

The most common mistake I see is treating the description as a keyword stuffing exercise. If you must ‘keyword stuff’ - use the ‘keywords’ field – that’s what it is for. Some people will tell you search engines ignore the meta keywords tag – they may well be right. The important thing is don’t confuse the description and the keywords fields, and keyword stuff the descriptions. Page Description should be a nice little entry enticing people onto your site. Don’t just list ‘Keyword 1, keyword 2, Keyword 2 plural, Keyword 1 plural’. You’ll just look spammy to the visitor, who might think there’s no real content on the site.

This is probably the least important of the three, because if your potential visitor has scanned your title and description and decided they are going to click, they probably will just hit whatever link is at the bottom. However, having a simple Url, and one that contains the correct keywords will help the potential visitor come up with an overall vision of what is on the page.

The problem with DNN is that the ‘Page Name’ is used for two purposes – once for the site menu, and once for the Url.    But even with that restriction, you should still take the time to try and craft a good page name. This will flow through to the Url when using Friendly Urls. And what makes a good Url usually makes a good menu item as well.

So what makes a good Url? Again it comes down to the expected action of the visitor, plus the keywords to use.   Remember Urls are actions in themselves – you click on the link, something happens. It may suit to use an action word accordingly. 

But also, remember this : more than anything else, the Url is the place for your keywords. The reason is two fold : Url space is finite, so the search engines know you must choose the most relevant terms for the Url.    Search Engines also places a lot of weight in the text of a link to a particular page. If someone copies/pastes the Url without changing the link text – at least the link text still has your chosen keywords in it.

Of course, disconnecting the Page Name and the Page Url helps when crafting Urls. This is one of the main advantages of the Url Master module. In several places I use the module to provide a more action oriented and keyword-rich Url, which doesn’t always read as well when it appears as link text and menu items.    In other places you can use the separation of Url and Page name to show ascii-character conversions of languages which use characters outside the ASCII set, such as umlauts and diacritic characters with accents.

An example is the Url Master page mentioned above: While the internal link for that page simply says ‘Url Master’, the Url takes advantage of the high keyword value for Urls and says ‘Url Master DNN Seo Urls’ – putting both singular and plural words for ‘Url’ in, plus the target platform ‘DNN’ and the action ‘SEO’.   You can only achieve this if you have a product like Url Master for your site (shameless plug)

Another benefit of a third-party Url provider like the Url Master, or the Free iFinity Friendly Url Provider is the ability to hyphenate the words, which gives the search engine discrete words to read and index. The standard DNN solution simply appends all of the words together, making potentially unreadable Urls.

Where to Change the Value

The Page Url is generated from ‘Page Name’ field, in ‘Page Settings’.

The most common mistake with Urls is not to include as many keywords as possible, or to not include a keyword at all. While older implementations of DNN don’t have friendly Urls, it’s not really an excuse to continue with ‘default.aspx?tabid=36’ style Urls – it is in your best interest to upgrade to the latest version of DNN. If you’re running anything later than 4.6, then you should at least turn ‘Human Friendly’ Urls on, or, even better, implement the free iFinity Friendly Url Provider, which will allow you to not only hyphenate your keywords, it will also provide 301-redirects for your ‘old’ Urls as well. However, 301 redirects is a different aspect of SEO, and one I’ll cover another day.

It’s important to include as many keywords as you can get away with and still have a reasonable looking Url. If you can include the action of the page and keep your keywords - even better.

Wrapping it Up

Adwords Information

Although Google Adwords isn’t that old, there has been a large amount of information written on it. Adwords are similar to SERP results in that they (a) appear after a search and (b) have a title, description and Url. It doesn’t hurt to read what Adwords experts say on improving the amount of clicks an Ad gets in Adwords, because most of the principals also apply to the amount of clicks you’ll receive on an ‘organic’ result, particularly if you aren’t the number 1 listing holder.

If you’re tracking your visitors with an analytics / tracking package, then you should try out slightly different results, and note them down. See if you can improve the number of clicks you receive, even if you don’t alter the order in which your page appears in the SERP.   The aim is to improve your title, description and Url combination to attract the most amount of clicks on the SERP. Doing this scientifically by tracking results is time-consuming and slow, but the results can certainly make the difference.

Don't Agree?

SEO is a highly-debated field as techniques and philosophies differ wildly.  If you agree or don't agree, leave your mark in the comments.  I'd like to hear anyones experience in increasing their traffic from a SERP without drastically changing their ranking.