Chapter 10 - Creating User-Friendly URLs with Aliasing

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a key role in every Web marketing strategy. Ektron CMS400.NET’s URL aliasing makes it easy to create descriptive, meaningful and SEO-friendly URL aliases consistently, maximizing your Web site’s placement in search results.

For a video introduction to Ektron CMS400.NET’s Aliasing feature, go to:

http://media.ektron.com/flash/urlaliasing/480x360/ektronaliasing/ektronaliasing.html

Human-readable URLs created on your Ektron CMS400.NETWeb site are predictable and scalable, following consistent patterns that can apply to all of your sites. The use of words and phrases that actually define the page itself increases these aliases’ search engine rankings. By following a pattern, they are scalable, and that pattern can be used across your sites as they grow.

Sites that are currently built migrate easily to CMS400.NET, adopting the new aliasing scheme. No longer do you have to make changes to the web.config, and aliasing can keep old links valid. Once the URL aliasing function is configured and enabled, all content inherits the new aliasing structure.

URL aliases generated by CMS400.NET don’t require an extension of how the page is built; search engines find “real” words. Web site performance affects search engine returns as well, and Ektron’s URL aliasing takes this into account: these aliases are cached, improving performance.

There are several important aspects of URL Aliasing

Automatic Aliasing - Normally-generated URLs are barely human readable, let alone search engine-friendly. With search engines using the text in a URL to define where a page shows up on a search return, it has never been more important to have descriptive URLs. While you can manually create aliases that will do the job, CMS400.NET gives you the tools you need to generate them automatically, with consistent structure.Automatic URL Aliasing

Taxonomy-Based Alias - URL aliases can be auto-created by Ektron CMS400.NET based on the taxonomy of your Web site. It uses the levels of the taxonomy plus the title of the page itself to produce an alias. Search engines will find those words, increasing the page’s relevancy in any search for them. And because it is based on the taxonomy (which lets content be established in one-to-many relationships), multiple aliases can be created that will have relevancy to multiple search criteria.

Folder-Based Alias - Ektron CMS400.NET can also automate the creation of folder-based URL aliases. Similar to taxonomy-based aliases, deriving an alias from the folder structure produces one that is relevant to the content’s actual location. With descriptive folder names and good organization, this produces SEO-friendly addresses comprised of folder structure plus title of page.

RegEx Based Alias - For some pages with content that follows a pattern, Regex aliasing may be the answer. It looks for a pattern in the current URL, and then replaces it with a different pattern to create a relevant alias. For example, a blog site may be best served by Regex aliases that rely on entry date.

Community Based Aliases for Users and Groups - can help make Social Media pages within your Ektron CMS400.NETWeb site easy to remember and find by simply using the User Name or the Group in the URL. An example friendly URL for Steve's profile page would be http://www.examplesite.com/steve.

Manual Aliasing- URL aliases for each content item can have a unique URL. Instead of your page including template names and parameters, an easier page name could be www.example.com/news.

This section also contains the following topics.

Effects of Aliasing Content

Benefits of Aliasing

Types of URL Aliasing

Features Not Supported by Aliasing

Aliasing and Relative Links

Configuring URL Aliasing

Automatic URL Aliasing

Manual Aliasing

Using RegEx Expressions

Community URL Aliasing

Site Aliasing

Upgrading from Previous Releases

Assigning an Alias to Multi-Language Content

Aliasing with Windows 2008 Server 64 Bit

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