Clever people have already written about SEO in Umbraco before, but it’s been a while and we wanted to plug a commercial Umbraco package that we use all the time.

Last year we were approached by our now client Vistaplan. They were unhappy with the performance of their existing website. They just weren’t getting the orders through their site that they really wanted. We built a brand new responsive Umbraco website that incorporates both Tea Commerce and also Richard Soetman’s SEO Checker package, in order to increase the profile of the site in Google.

We’ve had a site license for SEO Checker now for almost a year, and we now install it as part of all our new sites, where SEO matters to the the client.

Easy tool for Editors that aren’t SEO experts

At it’s core the package provides an easy to use SEO tool that can be attached to all pages on an Umbraco website. The SEO tool then provides a simple snippet of how a search will look in Google. After the the Editor has entered a focus keyword for the page, the tool analyses to check if that keyword is used consistently across the page.

Autovalidation

As well as supporting editors before they publish pages, SEO Checker also has a built in validation tool, that will crawl pages on the site as soon as they are published to ensure that they meet Google’s guidelines.

Common errors the validator can detect are broken links and missing heading tags. SEO Checker uses all the good advice and guidance in the Google SEO Starer Guide which is the bible for everyone starting out in SEO.

The validator also enables email notifications so that Editors can be warned whenever their site isn’t following best practice.

Manage redirections

URLs on sites often get changed as pages are renamed, or moved in the Umbraco content tree. SEO Checker also provides a redirection management tool, to record when URLs are being accessed that don’t exist in Umbraco. These 404 pages can then be configured in SEO Checker to redirect to a different location in Umbraco.

Meta tag management

SEO Checker also provides some simple developer tools to enable easier management of meta tags, including title, description, robots.txt and canonical url. SEO Checker can also automatically generate both an XML sitemap and a robots.txt file.

Overall we think that SEO Checker combines a set of tools to enable non-SEO exports to manage the content of the Umbraco site with a few little extras to make developers lives a little easier. It’s a winning combination, which is why we include it by default in all our site.

If you’re having trouble raising the profile of your Umbraco website, then why not come and talk to us about what we might be able to do to help you.