It is important to make your blog to search engine friendly so that visitors can find to your site and you get well targeted traffic from search engines. Because of that I made some basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to my blog which is using BlogEngine.NET software. In addition of that I added also tracking of visitors.
Sitemap
Sitemaps are files which tells for the search engines what pages your site contains. By using sitemaps you can be sure that the search engines know all pages of your site. This does not however mean that every page gets indexed though.
It was nice to notice that BlogEngine.NET has built-in support for sitemaps. The sitemap file is sitemap.axd. A reference to this file needs to be added to robots.txt to make search engine crawlers to be aware of it. There is already following line in that file:
#sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.axd
That line must be uncommented (remove the # character) and the url must be changed to a correct one. For example I changed that line to:
sitemap: http://www.mattilehtinen.com/blog/sitemap.axd
After modifying robots.txt, I uploaded the sitemap also to Google Webmaster Tools to see which pages are indexed and which are not. Using of Google Webmaster Tools is not necessary if you use robots.txt but it gives some nice statistics about your site.
URLs
URLs of BlogEngine.NET seemed to be by default in human readable format and not something like www.myblog.com?post=12345 which would be unacceptable. You want that there is keywords in your URLs because it helps search engines to know what your page is about. GET parameters should be avoided because the search engines do not understand them very well.
BlogEngine.NET automatically generates the URL from the title of the post which is nice because the URL automatically contains relevant words to your blog post. It is also possible to customize the URL of a post if required.
Titles
Titles of the post pages are autogenerated from the actual titles of the posts which is good thing. The bad thing was that BlogEngine.NET put by default the name of the blog before the post title like this:
Matti Lehtinen's Blog - Title Of My Blog Post
Instead of that I would prefer following:
Title Of My Blog Post - Matti Lehtinen's Blog
I don't want that people find my posts by using search phrase "Matti Lehtinen's Blog" because that's irrelevant. I want that the blog posts can be found by using the keywords of the posts. Google gives more value for words at the beginning of the title and that is why the title of the blog post should come before the name of the blog. Fortunately the titles can be improved by turning off the title prefixing feature from the settings tab by unchecking Prefixes the page titles with the name of the blog option. After that the page title contains only the title of the post which is much better choice.
Tracking of visitors
It is always nice to know how much visitors there is at your site so I added Google Analytics for my blog. This is easy to do. Just copy-paste your tracking script from Google Analytics to the Tracking Script text field in the settings tab. I added also my blog to FeedBurner and changed the RSS link point to the FeedBurner link from the Settings tab.
I am expecting that spam bots will find their way in the future to this blog so I installed Akismet Extension for BlogEngine.NET to help with that problem.
BlogEngine.NET is already quite search engine friendly. You don't need to make any big hacks to it if basic SEO is enough for you. I was actually positively surprised about the features of this blogging platform.
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