I figured I’d make today’s tidbit a 2 for Tuesday deal and post about a couple of ways to make your Community Server site even more search engine friendly.  CS out of the box is quite SEO, but there’s a couple of simple mods you can add to boost this even more.  The first is Scott Water’s Auto Name Your CS Posts CSModule.  By default (unless you specify the name of the post in the post editor) all CS posts are named as /archive/year/month/day/postID.aspx.  Most (if not all) major search engines would rather see keyword related content in the post title, which is exactly what his module does…if you were to have a post titled The World’s Greatest Post, the URL for that post would then become /archive/year/month/day/the_worlds_greatest_post.aspx.  Very SEO.

The second mod is Dan Bartel’s Google Sitemap generator.  For anyone not familiar with what a Google Sitemap is, head over here for more information.  Basically it’s an XML file that the GoogleBot can parse to get a tree-like representation of your site, which makes it easier for Google to spider and thus can increase the visibility of your site.  To see this in action, have a look at my SiteMap Index here, and my blog’s SiteMap here.  As an added bonus, once you get your SiteMap up and running, the SiteMap admin page will give you some high level stats about how the GoogleBot is spidering your site (such as unreachable URL’s, timeouts, crawl stats, etc…very useful for site admins).  On a scale of 1–10 for must have CS add-ins, this one ranks about an 11.

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Posted Tue, May 16 2006 3:23 PM by Jayson Knight