John Croson's Blog Home

My employer, IHBSOnline.com , uses the Efficon Articles 3.x module in DotNetNuke to aid in driving website traffic. Every morning, I troll the news sites , and add News content items to the module. Then I use Twitter to announce these additions. I can easily browse to the posts and see the number of hits these items generate. Image via CrunchBase I also use the iFinity Google Analytics module to track my web traffic . Unfortunately, you can't add this module to any post, since technically, it's not really a page. I played around a bit, and found that I was able to add my code to the DesktopModules/Articles/ArticleDetailsStandard.aspx, and start tracking my posts!

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Out of the box, DotNetNuke provides a method of programatically creating a search-engine friendly XML sitemap for easy website submissions to the likes of Google , Yahoo and others that accept that format. This is one of the first things to do in your quest for SEO . What it doesn't do, is accurately give a priority to pages. A priority is used by webmasters to set a level of imporance to a webpage. These numbers range from 0.0 to 1.0. All DotNetNuke sites prior to 5 assign a default value of 0.9 to all pages. Google, and others don't like the fact that all your pages have the same priority, which will likely cause them not to index your site. After doing a bit of research, I found a quick hack in the DotNetNuke forums , that assigns priorities based on page placement in your menu. 1 to your home page , 0.9 to all other first level pages, 0.8 to second level pages, and so on. Just recently I've found another approach outlined ...

Another step towards an SEO site, and providing a user-friendly site map , is to use Derek Trauger's DNN SiteMap Module . It does a fine job. Just have a look here: http://www.ihbsonline.com/Site_Map.aspx .

I've been reading quite a bit lately on improving SEO for our DotNetNuke website , IHBSOnline.com and quickly realized it just isn't enough to throw up a website, add a listing in a couple of search engines and wait for the masses. First off, the DnnFriendlyUrlProvider, while writing friendlier URL's than older versions of DNN, could be better. This is why you need the iFinity FriendlyURL provider. It is free, but keep in mind it is really designed for a single domain site, and presents other issues with some other 3rd party modules. If you fall into that category, I'd suggest you purchase the full version, as it adds additional functionality you'll need and want. Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife I've learned that Google and possibly other search engines actually penalize you if you create duplicate content. The duplicate content issue could easily arise if you have a host that responds to both http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com. Yo...