Every business wants to rank on page 1 of Google search engine result pages (SERPS).

The higher, the better. So how do you ensure your Sitecore website has the best chance of winning the ranking race?

To improve your Sitecore website's organic search ranking it's important your development and content teams follow some important SEO best practice tips for your Sitecore website

1. Ensure cross-device compatibility (mobile, tablet etc.) and cross browser compatibility

2. Produce frequent, well-written, unique, and contextual content

3. Don’t duplicate content

4. Include relevant keywords, but don’t keyword stuff

5. Use keywords in browser titles and H1 headers

6. Tag pages and media items

7. Include appropriately-sized images and rich media. For example YouTube, Vimeo etc. videos

8. Include relevant internal and external links, and if possible, back links

9. Ensure URLs include keywords

10. Add schema markup to your the page HTML to make your search results appear more attractive to potential visitors. When your web pages include Schema Markup, Google and other search engines use the data to improve the indexing of your content

    
    

Sitecore Experience Platform

We design and build Sitecore websites with SEO best practice in mind. By installing custom Codehouse modules and configurations to your website, its SEO performance and efficiency will improve:

• XML sitemap: Content inclusion in the sitemap is controlled by a simple checkbox in every page’s content pane. Priority and Frequency fields are also included to provide you with greater flexibility and sitemap accuracy. The sitemap updates itself as you manage, edit and publish content

• Uniform re-direct URL configuration: Ensures your URLs are uniformly and consistently presented. What does this mean? Because Sitecore adds .aspx to the end of all URLs by default, our module removes it, as well as removing a trailing ‘/’, or a language identifier from the url. This best practice ensures uniformity of the URL presentation for visitors and the search engines

• Codehouse 301 redirect module: To maintain SEO integrity, redirecting pages is vital when deleting or archiving pages. We integrate this module with our Sitecore builds. Its simple interface allows you to configure your 301s inside Sitecore

• Naming convention configuration: Sitecore can be configured to suit your naming convention requirements. For example, if you want to include hyphens in your URLs, which is SEO best practice, then Sitecore is configured to replace spaces-with-hyphens (on save) when content authors creates new items, while at the same time removing any capital letters in URLs for a consistent appearance

• SEO metadata module: This module adds meta description and tags fields to your content items. To classify whether pages should be indexed / followed or not, a Robots field is included to each content item, giving you the flexibility to select how bots behave when your pages are crawled

If you serve international markets and use language versioning in Sitecore, we'll apply hreflang attributes for language and regional URLs where relevant. The hreflang attribute tells Google which version of content to display based on the language and region. For example, if somebody in Spain is using Google, the /es version of your indexed web page will be listed in the search results.

Discover more tips on improving your website's health.

Working with Codehouse

We offer an SEO Audit service that covers a technical analysis of your website. It includes keyword research, on and off-page optimisation, backlink analysis and more. The audit also analyses key ranking factors that are embedded in the structure of your website.

Get in touch to find out more.