I am spending a lot of time building an SEO friendly site and thought I would share some of the items I found related to SEO:

URL REWRITING
DotNetNuke support search engine friendly URLs but not human friendly URLs (offers a provider interface for doing this). However, there are some modules that allow you to do human friendly ones. But there is no perfect module yet that creates both human & friendly URLs automatically. Inventua is the closest to this and they may add the feature in a few weeks. Other option is manually rewrite each link instance with a rewrite module.
SiteUrls.config - http://forums.asp.net/888126/ShowPost.aspx
Inventua Href Exchanger
URL Rewrite - http://forums.asp.net/896084/ShowPost.aspx
ISAPI filter
See Scott's Blog for details on this:
http://www.smcculloch.net/Resources/Articles/tabid/213/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/141/FriendlyURLsExplained.aspx

LINK EXCHANGE TOOL
Onyak LinkNex on Snowcovered is great. It automates link exchange process by allowing users to submit their link and a link where yours is at. So all you have to do is click approve or deny, notify the user who submitted and all done. This is much easier than going out and asking other ppl for links :) I have been customizing it for my use and module is cleanly written and easy to understand & modify. I even made a suggestion and he had a fix\option for it the next day!

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=zuIFVg3fts4%3d&CatalogItemID=1707&search=linknex&pagenumber=0

WEBSITE SPIDERING
I never understood quite what or how these modules worked. My sites spider pretty well as I have my own custom skin. I think with DNN 3.x sites spider fairly well now anyways with changes. Anyone can tell me the details of some of these modules and what their value is or what they do? I looked at the one module at it only supports dnn 1.x & 2.x so I think 3.x is good.
http://www.dotnetnuke-modules.com/Default.aspx?tabid=85

DYNAMIC KEYWORD\TITLE\DESCRIPTION
I spent awhile looking for easy ways to do this in 3.0.13 and finally gave up (after trying 3 proposed solutions w/out core change) and did it myself with DNN core changes. In one of my posts quite awhile back, someone I think said I was stupid requesting this as a feature. :)
But, in default.aspx/default.aspx.vb, I changed the title & description to literal controls and dynamically change them in my custom forums, events & locations modules. The end result is, when you search for one of my keywords, you get a lot of ugly looking results and then my beautiful ones which in yahoo look like so:
MY SITE > EVENTS > Miniature Golf
My Site Event Details: Come join us for 18 holes of miniature golf. This is a *very* fun course. No experience necessary -- beginners welcome! Cost is $7 to play, and we'll get a 20% discount for a group of 10 people or more. ...
MY SITE > FORUMS > Sample Test Forum Post
My Site Forum Details: Sample test forum post description

My pretty looking titles with the specific details (rather than just MY SITE > FORUMS) means that more ppl will click on it and it will appear higher in rankings. The fact that my targeted keywords for my page appear in my title helps a BUNCH. I'm no SEO expert yet, but after I did this all my pages are now close to top rankings for those keywords in yahoo.

So, in summary, I'd recommend adding this yourself or recommend having an easy way to change title\description dynamically within a control be added as a feature in DNN. Or, have someone post how to actually do this correctly with current DNN code. :)

SITEMAPS
There are some sitemap modules out there but not sure what everyone's opinion of them is? Do they link well for search engines? I am guessing at some point I will need to use one as my site starts getting large. But for now, I just manually create my own sitemap as I can control the links and how it is organized. Speerio has a nice looking one.

Hope this is helpful to some people. Feel free to comment on your SEO successes, favorite modules, DNN improvements you'd like to see, etc.....

Jason

Excellent! Thanks for sharing.

I spent some time on this as well and found TextInjector helpful as well. I'm not SEO expert either, but apparently spiders still have problems with JavaScript, which makes Speerio's Sitemap almost useless. I really like the module so please correct me if I'm wrong. HouseIndex  does a better job in that regard.

Thanks for putting this together!

Also, I forgot, there are valuable tools for assessing your SEO efforts. Sitelog modules tell you details such as website referrals, hits, etc... DNN has a default sitelog but these are alternatives. I tried out the three that looked best on Snowcovered & ran these on my DNN 3.0.13 portal.

SITE LOG STATISTICS

For Expert User
SiteTrak - by far the most feature rich and complicated. I could not get it to work. And was so intimidated (and don't have the time), I gave up right away. The install requires you to add a "server" & "client" & "report" modules & requires a lot of configuration by the user  & I had no idea why. So, this one has the most features (I was quite excited about everything it did!) but I'd recommend only for complicated sites or for expert users. I was disappointed. Even if I can get it to work, I don't want to have to repeat the complicated install process for all 30 of my portals.

ONE BIG SEO ADVANTAGE: This module has detailed directory & search engine info including keywords used to access site. This feature, in my opinion, is awesome for tracking SEO.  I just wish I had the patience to try to figure out how to use this module.

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=ElocmScJDgw%3d&CatalogItemID=1153&search=site&pagenumber=1

For Moderate User
I'd recommend SiteReport 1.0. I actually think this is the best site reporting option out there. Even though I haven't actually got it running yet. :) It lets you customize your own expert\complicated reports or you can use the basic standard ones out of the box. It uses an XML template & the developer is planning on sharing future XML report templates from him and other users.

This one even sends out customized email reports at a certain user defined interval.

Installation is easy. Although I have not figured out how the XML stuff works yet (uses DNN import/export). I think the developer needs to add a better explanation here. But I am assuming, from an email with him, this is a simple process. So you should be able to get the basic report going right away. And then later customize it or add additional reports without code changes.

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=ZQhEwzviO%2bM%3d&CatalogItemID=1798&search=site&pagenumber=0

For Beginner (and all) Users
GotDNN SiteStats The developer still has a bug to fix with TopReferrers (coming shortly) but this is by far the easiest  module. And it is embarassingly cheap at $6.99. There is no source though but this module is simple, effective and cheap. It gives you a quick, clean, practical summary of your website in a readable format (much better than DNN standard). Including options to see the last time you were googled or the top site referrals to your website. Nice replacement for the existing DNN sitelog and you can give any user access to it. Everyone should get it at this price.

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=R6%2fYj57wJp0%3d&CatalogItemID=1473&search=site&pagenumber=1


My Choice
I personally am going to use GotDNN SiteStats and SiteReport 1.0 both on my site. When I get the time down the road, I may look into getting SiteTrak to work for its keyword feature. But, I would love it if someone could create an XML report for SiteReport 1.0 that tracked keywords. Heck, I'd pay $100 for just the XML template is someone was indeed able to do this with this module (and do it well)!

Another interesting DNN module I have not tried is for the new Google Sitemaps:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

There are some free generic sitemap generators out there. But there is also one for DotNetNuke on Snowcovered:
Anyone have any comments on it? 
http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&CatalogItemID=1829

Jason

If you want to track keywords, optimize your pages, and a even research the best keywords then you might be interested in checking out 
WebCEO
The free version is awesome.

You may also be interested in these free resources that are available on my site:

Search Engine Optimization Made Easy - 90 page pdf guide

and  Keywords Research Guide - 75 page pdf guide

To add further resources to this post, over the past couple of issues we've added:

SEO and DotNetNuke MP3 Interview

Google Sitemaps MP3 Interview

Jagger, Google Analytics, and the Future of Search & SEO

Thanks,

Thanks.

An other thing to keep in mind when SEO sites is semantic.
Semantic is importent when working with skins. Div's or tables. Does not matter.
What is of high importance is to make sure your skin/Css put you most important content
as close to the <body>tag as possible. This is because the spiders are not indexing all of your content, rather they indexes so many words on each page/tab.

Also when writing articles or putting content on a page, make sure you use the <H> tags. Your main heading get H1 then the other gets H2 and so on. If you are dying for them to look the same style them in Css rather then giving all H1. This is because most search engines uses this method to weigh your content, and then gives it relevance.

And of course as usually I can not stop speaking of the wonderfull Css and Div's.
Div's give you an edge compared to similar sites without Div's. Not saying you need to do completly without tables, but good practice is to minimize the use of tables to a bare minimum.

For those wanting to know about URLs Scott release a new URL provider that is both SEO and human friendly at http://www.ventrian.com. This means you can have links like mysite com/forums.aspx and also mysite com/tabid/45/fid/23/default.aspx on same website.

In addition, take a look at Scott's Articles on his website and you will see he replaces default.aspx with the article title. You can also see this done extensively now on my site at http://www.yapclub.com/dfw in my events and forums.

And, for a test, go to any page on the www.dotnetnuke.com site and replace the default.aspx with whatevernameyouwant.aspx and you will see each page loads the same without needing the "default" part.

There is a FriendlyUrl method in the core (it's not in NavigateURL) that allows you to set this to whatever value you want or default.aspx by default.

Those who are working on SEO know these are 2 very valuable features for DNN to make pages come in search more often. As an example, just take a look at some of the 'junk' pages you find in search and you will see url strings and titles with the same keywords.

Also, FYI I am working on my own portal stats module and have a very advanced keyword tracking feature which is really cool and very helpful for tracking seo. Hoping to release it this summer.

Jason

 

Also, if using the seo friendly urls be careful as if you use it wrong it can hurt you. Make sure you are consistent when using Navigateurl in which order you put the parameters. As the link mysite com/tabid/45/fid/23/mid/44/tid/3/default.aspx and mysite com/tabid/45/tid/3/mid/44/fid/23/default.aspx will both load the same page but a search engine will see two different file structures here and hence "duplicate" content. Generally, duplicate content is not considered good for seo.

One problem is that you may have a scenario where you have many links to similar content but with different parameters. I had this happen on my website where you could view details on a location from 2 different sources on my website but one of them had an additional parameter which showed an additional hyperlink. My thought was to add that additional parameter to the query string at the end as opposed as a friendly parameter so the "file structure" looks the same and perhaps the search engine will treat this as one single page.

Jason

Some more information to add here. I've seen in threads where DNN is not XHTML 1.0 compliant. While that shouldn't have an impact on SEO, having quality formatting is important. It is smart to be sure to validate your pages with a tool such as validator.w3.org.

While this is smart to do in any case, it really  is a smart thing to do with DNN as it is a framework that generates a lot of automated html code and such and mix those in with 3rd party modules and you never know where some bad html code somewhere (such as missing table tags) can mess up your site and confuse search engines.

This happened to me and after fixing all the mess I caused from my poorly formatted custom modules by PR on a few pages shot from 0 or 1 to 4 (where they should have been).

Jason

Also, here is something an expert in DNN can do.....

With the new URL rewriter at
http://www.ventrian.com/Support/ProductForums/tabid/118/view/topics/forumid/35/Default.aspx

it is now easy to make your own customized and much more flexible rules for URLs. You can still use the SiteUrls.config to make special rules but those are for specific instances, are more limited and if you have 40+ portals like mine can be very time consuming (and perhaps performance affecting) to do.

With changes specific to my site may in the latest url rewriter I can do the following :
http://www.yapclub.com/dfw/events/394/monthly-party.aspx (live example)

mysite com/events/23/this-is-an-event-name.aspx
mysite com/mexican-restaurants/34/this-is-a-restaurant-name.aspx
mysite com/sports-bar/45/this-is-a-bar-name.aspx
mysite com/night-club/45/this-is-a-bar-name.aspx

What's nice here is that I have my own code for generating urls that is SEO intelligent. So for one example, all my "locations" may point to the same tab with my same code for displaying but if the location is a mexican restaurant rather than just put "location" I put "mexican-restaurant" in my url. Combine this with dynamic setting of Browser Titles (mentioned in this thread) and you have a great seo combination.

Jason