Search Engine Optimization

Overview

The main things that affect how well your site's pages show up in search engine results are

  • Do your pages have relevant content (to the search terms)?
  • Is your content marked up semantically with proper headings and good titles?
  • Does your page URL also reflect the title?
  • Do you have relevant page meta descriptions?

You can add keywords as well, but these have been so abused historically that search engines pretty much ignore them today, especially if the key words do not appear relevant to the content of the page. It's also important to submit your site map(s) to search engines to make it easier for them to find and index your content.

mojoPortal content management system is designed to make it easy for you to get good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We produce good semantic markup with proper headings. Friendly URLs that match the page name are automatically suggested, and URLs are generally short. Though good URLs are suggested by default, you can override them, with one important consideration.

By default, mojoPortal uses extensionless URLs without the .aspx for CMS pages, and mojoPortal also automatically adds cannonical URL links to avoid duplicate content problems.

Beware of Snake Oil and SEO Link Spammers

Be aware that there are a lot of companies out there pitching SEO services. Some of them may be legitimate, but really if you follow the advice in this document you do not need them. Worse, some of these companies are real "snake oil" types that will take your money and do bad things to try and increase your search rank. If you try to fool Google into giving your site a high search rank for content that is not relevant, it will eventually backfire and hurt your SEO. I see this happen every now and then on this site--people make "link spam" forum posts or blog comments just so they can add a link back from this site to their own site. This is usually some SEO snake oil company trying to improve the search rank of their customers by having more inbound links from legitimate sites. In mojoPortal, we automatically add a rel="nofollow" to links posted in the blog comments and forums, so the link spammers won't benefit from this technique.

Last Modified: Dec 03, 2020