Optimizing page URLs for SEO in Sitecore

URLs are an important element of search engine optimization. By optimizing them you will expand the reach of your website.

SEO-friendly URLs and Sitecore: it’s an opportunity

Sitecore is an extensible platform that allows you to customize nearly everything about it. Although it contains some rich capabilities, there are situations that require you to extend it to get the desired results. Building SEO-friendly URLs for your pages is one of them.

When creating pages in Sitecore you are responsible for creating proper URLs yourself. By default Sitecore uses the page’s title for its URL. As you can imagine this is far from optimal and leads to URLs containing spaces and other special characters.

The need for optimizing page URLs for Internet search engines in Sitecore isn’t new. In fact there are many solutions available on the Internet that help you deal with this challenge. The problem with them is however, that they do it automatically for you. This seems great at first: after all as a content editor you don’t need to do anything about it. In reality you are missing a great opportunity of optimizing your website for Internet search engines and expanding its reach.

Crafting SEO-friendly page URLs is not complex but requires some effort. So do you need to do it all by yourself or is there a better way?

Optimizing page URLs for SEO the right way

Mavention SEO Slugs is a Sitecore module that helps you optimize URLs of your pages for Internet search engines. Every time you create a new page, Mavention SEO Slugs will automatically suggest you a SEO-friendly page slug. Mavention SEO Slugs will store that slug in the standard Display Title field so if you need to change it, you are free to do so. This allows you to control the URLs of the pages and optimize them for Internet search engines.

When generating SEO-friendly page URLs Mavention SEO Slugs uses the page title as input. It converts the title to lowercase and replaces all special characters with dashes. Then it replaces all special letters with their simple equivalents (for example ü will become u). Additionally, if you create pages in English or Dutch, Mavention SEO Slugs also removes all noise words. As a result a page with the title ‘Optimizing page URLs for SEO in Sitecore’ would get a slug of ‘optimizing-page-urls-seo-sitecore’. Mavention SEO Slugs stores this slug in the standard Display Title field meaning you can change it or translate it if necessary.

Mavention SEO Slugs is only active when editing content. It doesn’t interfere with processing request and with that has no impact on the performance of your website.

Summary

URLs are an important piece of optimizing your website for Internet search engines. By crafting SEO-friendly URLs you can expand the reach of your website through organic search results. Just as you optimize your copy for your audience, you should optimize your URLs for search to achieve the best results. Mavention SEO Slugs helps you build SEO-friendly URLs allowing you to fine-tune them if necessary.

Download: Mavention SEO Slugs from the Sitecore Marketplace