SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

One of the questions my clients most often ask is: “How do I make sure my dnn blog is SEO friendly and still interesting for my readers?”.  Below are some tips and tricks with the built-in features of Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke, that will help you catch search engines’ attention and optimize your blog posts.

Blog Post/Article Structure

Title

The post title will show in the browser tab bar (called ‘Meta Title’) and it should use one but no more than two primary keywords with one keyword being the first word of the title.

Using more than three or more key words in a title may result in your post being ignored/penalized by search engines for ‘keyword stuffing’ or ‘blog spam’. Just keep in mind that Google pays particular attention to titles - so make sure you get them right. And you can get more SEO tips about blog title from this post 10 Tips to Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Titles.

Friendly Url with Post Slug

This post slug is the alternative title for your post and we build friendly seo post url with it if not empty. By default, the post slug will be automatically retrieved from the blog post’s title provide you check the option [Show SEO Friendly URL] in the blog settings panel.  For example, by default, some specific post having the following URL:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/5-Killer-Features-will-be-Available-on-SunBlogNuke.aspx

Unfortunately, this is not a very search engine friendly URL, as many of the keywords with meaningless words, such as the word "will" & "be", are at the end of the URL.  By setting your own custom post slug, you are able to create a better URL for the post:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/Killer-Features-SunBlogNuke.aspx

In this case, the post url focuses on the keywords for this post, creating more emphasis on them.  The great thing about this tip is it takes a very minimal amount of time to do and will become second nature once you’ve turned it into a habit. If unchecked the option [Show SEO Friendly URL], we also provide the one click utility feature to extract the post slug from title and adjust it into your expected value.

Meta Description

The description (META Description tag) is a one or two sentence statement that tells the reader what your blog post is about when those posted founds in search engines. And it should be a maximum of 150 characters and contain at a maximum of two keywords. But out dilemma is, how do we populate the “content” section of the META description dynamically based on what content we’re viewing?  Simple — we use a combination of conditional tags and a custom loop to pull either the page title (if we’re on the homepage) or the description (if we’re in a single post). With that our blog platform will create such unique description tags for each post page. Usually, most bloggers don’t take advantage of the use of the “optional description” section of their Write Post panel. But if you want to exercise even more control over what gets displayed on the search engine results page(SERP) for content, then you need to be filling this section out.  If this field is blank, your post description will be generated with the first 150 characters in your post.

Meta keywords

The SunBlogNuke also support Meta keywords with a combination of page key words and all tags of each post. But recently Google Confirms Meta Keywords Tag Not used for Rankings, you just ignore it and let it there now.

Canonical Link

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced support for a new 'Canonical Link Element' in the header of your website page that will help clean-up duplicate url's that have been indexed by search engines. This issue is so specially serious in DotNetNuke that there are duplicated contents returned for different urls. For example, the link 'domain.com/default.aspx?tabid=38'  and 'domain.com/home/tabid/38/default.aspx' retures the same page of content in your dnn site.  As for our blogging module, you can build the canonical link for your post to avoid duplicate Urls. Just insert the following code in the top of the current theme file  detailsview.ascx like that:

VB.NET version:

<script language="vb" runat="server">
    Protected Overrides Sub OnInit(ByVal e As EventArgs)
        If Entry IsNot Nothing Then
            AddGenericLink("canonical ", String.Empty, Entry.Link)
        End If
    End Sub
</script>

C# version:

<script language="c#" runat="server">
    protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
    {
        if (Entry != null) AddGenericLink("canonical", string.Empty, Entry.Link);
    }
</script>

Note that it just works v4.6+. As for the older version you also apply it with the similar way.

I hope this has helped answer the question about how to make your dnn blog posts SEO Friendly as well as interesting for your readers. Though SunBlogNuke comes with several built-in features for SEO, please you should know that “Content is King". The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a blog engine, such as awesome tutorials that help people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written. If you have more questions about  this topic or blogging,  Please feel free to post a comment below.  I’ll be happy to help.