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I’ve had some feedback lately which usually goes something like this:

“Now that DotNetNuke 5.1.2 has SEO Friendly Urls by default…”

The rest of the sentence is irrelevant – what I’d like to focus on is the assumption that the latest version of DNN has SEO Friendly Urls.

Now, anyone who regularly reads my blog will know that posts generally fall into either a self-interest post (telling you something I have for you) or an information post (telling you something I know).  This post is going to fall into both categories.  I’m going to tell you things that I know, and in the process of doing that, tell you how I’ve solved that problem with something I have.

But first, a recap.

What is an SEO Friendly Url? I’d like to offer a definition on this one:

“An SEO Friendly Url is a globally unique Url that communicates to both humans and search engines what is the most important content on that page, within the standards and conventions of the web, and in the simplest way...

In the beginning… Ever since Sergey and Larry invented the PageRank algorithm, published it and started Google, people have been looking for ways to build lots of external links to their sites.  Up to a little while ago, this was done through sending out email spam looking for link exchanges, and having ‘link’ pages.  While there is still benefit in trading links with relevant people, I suspect most people delete link exchange requests immediately without even reading them, just like I do.

Along comes ‘web 2.0’ While I’m not a fan of the term, one of the features of ‘Web 2.0’ was the level of interaction people could have with websites.  While forums are nothing new, being able to create and upload content on wiki style sites, as well as leave comments on blogs without creating accounts was the next big thing in SEO spammers.   The early blog software was pretty basic, and it didn’t take much effort to write an automated bot to go and automatically post your links all over the web.    The response to...

Google recently posted advice on it’s Google Webmaster blog advice that the Meta Keyword tag in Html pages does not count towards ranking.  This is not really news to anyone who follows trends in SEO and does research into what works well and what doesn’t, but it’s an interesting move by Google. 

A Short History of the Meta Keyword Tag If you’re the sort who gets confused with your metas, tags, links and scripts, the Meta Keyword is a particular Html tag that is embedded in the page, but not visible to the end user.   You can see this if you view the source of a web page - the syntax is as follows:



You can also see this information in FireFox under the Tools->Page Info menu item.

This is contained in the Html section of a standard web page.  The tag is as old as Html itself, and reached it’s zenith in the mid 1990’s with the early search engines using...