How do I get my DotNetNuke portal on search engines?

DotNetNuke makes it easy for many new webmasters to get their sites online quickly. The result of this is the webmasters are very green when it comes to how the web works. So now we have a lot of web masters who believe that they just click the Submit to Google button in DNN and bam, they’re done. This is not the case. And while Google is arguably the most popular search engine, it’s not the only search engine so we want to get listed on others. If you are still reading then I’ll assume you are one of those web masters or not, but you want to make sure you have all your bases covered. 

            The first thing you need to do is make sure your site is ready for submission. You need to have some content on your site that is relevant or useful. This is not hard and it doesn’t require long articles like this. But I would suggest at least a paragraph or two on every page no matter what. Then you need to make sure you have your keywords listed in your page titles, description, and keywords section. These same keywords should be in the content on the respective page. DotNetNuke will take the title, description, and keywords from the [Admin->Site Settings] if you leave any of the fields blank. Verify this by looking at the source. This is useful to know in the beginning because you probably aren’t spending a lot of time custom tuning each individual page to target certain keywords. This is an advanced technique that can come later.  And leaving these blank can save you time now. You only have one place now to tweak all your keywords. The absolute worse thing you could do is make your page title the same as your page name IF the page name doesn’t have your keywords. One popular example of this mistake is to have a Contact Us page and set the title to Contact Us. You would be better off leaving the title blank. The system will automatically take your site settings title and append your page name to the end. This is probably the best solution in all cases. Leave page titles blank. Ok. I think I have said that enough. The last thing you need is to have a search engine friendly way to navigate your site. The DotNetNuke menu and links modules won’t provide that without planning. This is covered in our earlier article.

So your site is ready for submission, now what? Well, Google currently doesn’t penalize you for submitting over and over. So let’s go ahead and submit your site from the [Admin -> Site Settings] page. Just click the submit site to google button and bam. You should end up at google with a confirmation. Go ahead and do that for each of your pages too inside of each page setting screen.  Now some of you have many aliases for your site. Your question may be, what alias is getting submitted? Is it the first one? Right now DNN submits your site based on which ever alias you are currently using. So if you have multiple aliases, go ahead and submit the one which could get you better ranks in google. Which one is that? The alias with better keywords in it’s URL. An advanced technique may be to submit individual pages with the alias most keyword specific for that page. But I have not tested this so it’s up to you. I wouldn’t over do the alias submission though. Google may believe you have many cloned sites which could end up negatively affecting your ranking. And as for other search engines I would be very careful about the submission and how frequently I submit to them. A rule of thumb for beginners: Except for Google, only submit a site once every 8 weeks. If you spam some of these engines it will negatively affect your ranking.

Which site is next? I will provide a list to key US search engine sites at the end of this document. A quick Google will reveal many more.  What about those tools that automatically submit my site to several search engines? Well the effective tools cost hundreds of dollars. The free tools or cheap tools can hurt you more than it can help. Some search engines forbid the use of automated tools and some tools will submit your site multiple times to the same engine. So don’t be fooled by hosts who say they will submit your site to 50 search engines with their easy tools. So again the best thing to do is to plug your site in by hand at each of the sites listed below. If you aren’t in the US, you may also want to find the corresponding local version of these search engines.

These places are very important to submit to. They aren’t search engines but many search engines feed from them. So if you get listed on these sites you will in effect start getting added to other search engines.

Directories

http://dmoz.org/add.html - Free. Follow all their rules. Be nice to them.  Don’t submit your site too deep in the categories. Choose a category that’s relevant but more general.

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html - Look for the free non-commercial directory submission. Yahoo started charging for commercial sites. This page also has a free Yahoo search engine submission. Don’t confuse the two this is not the directory.

http://www.zeal.com/ - Looksmart free submission for non commercial sites.

http://submit.looksmart.com – Looksmart submission for commercial sites. 

Search Engines

Alexa - http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html

Lycos - http://insite.lycos.com/default.asp - Click the Manage Accounts link on the left bar and register.

Yahoo - http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Not a long list right? Well it turns out all most of the other engines out there feed from the places listed above. So now you wonder about those tools that claim to make 50 submissions for you, how many places are they actually submitting to? Finally you may be wondering why you aren’t listed or how long this will take. The rule of thumb here is 8 weeks. I’ve had Google take longer on some sites and less on others. It will help if you exchange links with a quality related site which is already on these search engines.

Thanks for reading. I hope it was helpful,

John