SEO Strategies for DNN

We help businesses with their online DNN presence with Digital Marketing, CRO & SEO
Managing SEO With DNN

DNN SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice that entails all relevant and appropriate tactics that drive traffic from search engines to your site. The results include higher rankings in the traditional result pages (referred to as organic search results), local listings, and a more active website.

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For an SEO campaign focusing around a DNN website or system of portals, the approach is slightly different. Since the DNN content management system is based on ASP.Net & MSSQL instead of PHP & MySQL which is the basis of many other CMSs, some functions or capabilities that you're familiar with in WordPress are handled differently.

What are the Major Differences?

Optimizing SEO on DNN

Understanding the factors that affect SEO is important to knowing what needs to be done, both on and off-site. Off-site elements, such as Link building, thought leadership, social media, press releases, etc. all stay the same, pretty much no matter what CMS you're using. The differences are basically down to how to configure the on-site and on-page elements, and if there are modules or plug-ins that help you with your optimization. WordPress has been around for so long, that it has more out-of-the-box plug-ins for SEO (Yoast SEO is the most popular) configuration. DNN doesn't really have any until now. Clarity has finally developed a custom DNN Module for the administration of your on-page SEO meta tags (SEO page title, Meta description, Key words).

When you edit the page settings in DNN, the SEO meta tags are placed right on the page, making it very easy to add the tags. The WYSIWYG editor makes it easy to specify the H2, H3... The difficulty is really around the canonicals and H1's. H1's should be done manually as text in the banner, or at the top of your content if you don't have a graphical banner. The canonical is a field that's not auto-populated within the DNN CMS, yet important to Google to ensure you don't get duplicate pages indexed, which is very common. Since it's a field that's not accessible for editing, that means that you have to either have a developer, like Clarity, programmatically do that for you, or add it in manually for every page.

To manually add a canonical tag to a DNN page:

Edit Page settings, Advanced tab, S.E.O. sub-tab, and paste your canonical tag into the Page Header Tags section.

Here's an example of a properly formatted canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.clarity-ventures.com/services/dotnetnuke-seo" />

*NOTE: Don't forget to include the full static path to the page, and make sure it's in all lower case.

Where Can I Learn More?

SEO Resources

As an SEO-certified developer, Clarity spends a ton of time helping our clients with their SEO strategies and implementation. Clarity can help you too. Whether you're just looking for someone to provide an SEO audit and analysis, or someone to train your team, or a marketing team to take over and do it all, Clarity can help. Here are some articles we've put together to help you with your understanding of SEO and putting together a winning SEO strategy: