SEO Friendly Sitefinity Blog URLs

by Stephen Horn Dec 12, 2014

One thing every client wants, and needs, is a good blog page. This is a concept that is not really foreign to anyone.  What a lot of clients do not often realize, however, is that a good clean blog URL is just as important as having the blog in order to reap the benefits of SEO. This principle would not just hold true for blog pages, but press releases, event listings, etc.

By default, however, the URLs generated by Sitefinity content modules are a bit "SEO clunky."  One of the biggest issues is that, for example, Sitefinity Blog URLs are constructed by default with the full title of the post hyphenated. While Sitefinity offers an easy work around in the 'More Options' section of the 'Create a Post' widget, this only solves part of the problem. 


blogUrlExample

The first part of any Sitefinity blog post URL contains the date of the post. While I'm a proponent of having the date of the post on the blog post itself somewhere, the URL is not that place. However, this part of the URL is built internally by Sitefinity, so how do we solve the issue?

In 2011 Sitefinity's Slavo Ingilizovs blogged about how to create Custom URL Formats for Sitefinity Content Modules.  While this post was not focused on being SEO friendly, it shows a developer everything they need to know in order to customize the URL format for any content module. The URL examples he uses may not be what you are after, but you can easily get there from where he takes you.  And best of all, even though the post is nearly 5 years old, I've used this method a recently as last month, in Sitefinity 7.1!

http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/slavo-ingilizovs-blog/2011/10/19/custom_url_formats_for_sitefinity_content_modules

As an example, compare one of our blog links to the Sitefinity blog link above. It's only a handful of characters difference, but in SEO land, sometimes that makes all the difference!

http://www.inalign.com/Blog/telerik-sitefinity-7.0-released!

Need some help making your Sitefinity URLs more SEO friendly, or have any other custom Sitefinity work you need done? Drop us a line! 

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