Boost SEO in your Episerver Solution

Even better than usual, Ascend Vegas gathered customers, partners and key Epi personnel.

This year, I got an opportunity to hold a lab on how Episerver helps editors and developers out with SEO as well as how a developer can, with very little effort, honour the technical SEO.

Out of the box, Episerver offers a good basis + some built-in features:

Good URL management (URL gets generated from Page name; URL reflects the structure of the site)
Great language management (URLs reflect the language settings)
Canonical & alternate URLs
Easy handling of meta info
Lots of examples in Alloy tech demo site - available through Visual Studio Extension

Aside of built-in features, I've also demonstrated two commercial and two non-commercial add-ons:

While the first two are rather self-explanatory, the last ones focus on 1) SEO manager - helps with page moves (keeps a history of all previous page URLs and 301-redirects the users to the new ones) + is essential when releasing a new site - gives possibility to redirect a bulk of old URLs); 2) Gives a game-like score for the page together with suggestions on how to make it better by adjusting the content. The websites available: SEO manager and SiteAttention.

The challenge of packaging a lab to 45 minutes, where the audience should do some live coding together with you, made me scope down the number of snippets. All code is available on github (applied to AlloyTech) and the latest commit shows how to:

Add warnings on page publish (recommended instead of errors, in this case)
Register a partial route that gives you a nice pagination-related URLs
Add meta rel prev & next in case of pagination
Handle different tinyMCE settings through code - although now freshed up with the new Tiny! Read more on the World!

The presentation available here.