Do you know if the search engines are finding your SharePoint web content? If your pages are not optimised, the search engines are going to have a hard time finding you. As a result, your website won’t rank as high as it could and you might be losing valuable business opportunities. Improving your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t hard and can have many benefits.

Microsoft Recommends

A nifty article from Microsoft titled, “How to Optimize SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) Sites for Search Engines” provides a goldmine of hints and tips to help get your MOSS content more visible to the search engines.

1. Make sure to include plenty of keywords and key phrases throughout your page.
2. Include a description that reflects the contents of the page. This might seem like redundant information but the search engines crawl descriptions.
3. The higher your content is on the page, the more likely the search engines are to pick it up. Don’t bury your good stuff at the bottom.
4. Search engines prefer hyperlinks but make sure they have descriptive text.
5. Ensure your Meta tags accurately reflect the content of the page. The search engines have become perceptive and are now comparing content to the Meta tags. Too few or too many keywords act as a warning signal to search engines.
6. Create descriptive page titles.
7. Use the Robots Exclusion Standard.
8. Take the time to utilise the proper codes to identify the elements of a page such as headlines, subheadings, titles, and lists.
9. Make sure you have a sitemap

Fair Warning

While there are many things you can do to improve your SEO, there are also some things you should avoid doing.

1. Don’t give all your pages the same page title. This makes it impossible for the search engines to rank you.
2. Don’t try to trick the search engines by stuffing your page with keywords.
3. Don’t use complex URLs or bury your pages in a site. The search engines will have a hard time finding you.
4. Keep your pages simple. Too many elements confuse the search engines.
5. Do not use hidden text visible to search engines but not your visitors.
6. Avoid using temporary redirects.

New for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

One nice feature of SharePoint 2010 is web analytics allowing you to monitor search terms and site usage. This will be particularly useful for companies wanting to remove unused sites. Additionally, it will give business valuable insight into how employees are using SharePoint.

With a little effort and some attention to detail, your MOSS 2007 WCM will provide rich content to the search engines improving your website rankings. SharePoint 2010 provides useful web analytics helping to improve the design and implementation of your site. For more useful hints, tips and techniques, visit our Tricks & Tips page.

What things are you doing to improve your SharePoint SEO?