Search Engine Optimization for
SharePoint
Ryan McIntyre, MCITP, MCPD
Neudesic
Practice Director, Portals & Collaboration
November 12, 2011
Core Lines of Business
Consulting
Services
As we built trusted
partnerships with our
customers, we’ve
extended our
services to hosting
and ongoing support
and administration.
Managed
Services
2
Neudesic started its
business providing best of
breed consulting services
on the Microsoft Platform.
Products
Solutions
As clients (our
partners) began to ask
us to do solve similar
problems to fill the gap,
Neudesic started
packaging re-usable IP
to save time and
money.
Search Engine Optimization 101
• Search Engine Optimization == SEO
• Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO)
is the process of improving the visibility of a
website or a web page in search engines via
the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or
"algorithmic") search results
• This is Art, not Science
– http://technet.microsoft.com/enus/sharepoint/seo does not exist!
Topics
• Public SEO, not SharePoint/FAST search SEO
• SharePoint SEO
• Real World Deployment Scenarios
SEO Lifecycle
Define Goals &
Audience
Measure Results
& Adjust Plan
Internet Updates
Target Keywords
Platform /
Content Updates
Business Drives SEO
• Business goals change, impacting SEO
activities
• Keywords & Content must be updated to
reflect business goals
• Perform necessary keyword research
– Interview customers
– Research related websites
– Research tools
How Does SharePoint Help?
• Gives the business the tools they need to keep
content fresh
• Ability to implement custom master pages &
page layouts
• Flexible Platform
How Do We Help SharePoint?
•
•
•
•
Site structure
Refresh content
Link structure (rel=“no follow”)
Redirects: 302 (temp) BAD, 301 (perm) GOOD
Keywords
Research
Adjust
Measure
Select Keywords
& Phrases
Optimize Usage
Robots.txt
• AAA TripTik
• Tells the crawler what to look at and what to
avoid
• Exclude search results and other non-content
pages
Sitemap.xml
• Tells the crawler which URLs to crawl
• Keep up to date…Crawler’s don’t like being
lied to!
Single topic Single URL
Courtesy of seomoz.org
Measure & Evaluate
• Webmaster tools (Google & Bing)
• Search for “site:www.mysite.com” and review
results
• IIS SEO Toolkit
– Site Analysis Module
– Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes Module
– Robots Exclusion Module
Demo
• Webmaster tools
• IIS SEO Toolkit
Neudesic.com
• “Clean” master page
• Simple content using CEWP’s & HTML
• jQuery / Client Object Model used for
asynchronous loading
• Keywords surrounding links
• News feed on home page frequently updated
• Reciprocated links with
• No Flash / Silverlight
QuickStartOnlineServices.com
Microsoft Partner Network Site focusing on
Online Services
• Light-weight home page (HTML)
• News feed on home page
• No Flash / Silverlight
Resources
• Generate Sitemap with PowerShell
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2010/04/
13/generate-sharepoint-2010-sitemap-withwindows-powershell.aspx
• IIS SEO Toolkit
http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit
• Webmaster Tools
– Bing - http://www.bing.com/webmaster
– Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
• URL Rewrite Fix for 302 redirects
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/sharepoint-redirectsrevisited-301-302/
Resources (cont)
• SharePoint SEO Code Packages
– Meta-tag management:
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/easy-editing-meta-tagspublishing-pages-mavention-meta-fields/
– Meta-tag, Title, & Dynamic List/Library support:
http://www.canviz.com/CanvizBlog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=10
Ryan McIntyre
ryan.mcintyre@neudesic.com
http://blog.randomdust.com
@ryanmcintyre
303-520-6337