Do Intranets really need Search Engine Optimization? | Hubfly
If you have a business, most likely you would already have a website. And if you’re selling a product or a service you will be looking to see your website as a sales machine. To make that happen you should rank your site high in Search Engines. While doing such ‘external’ SEO is complicated and is often at the mercy of Search Engine algorithms, ‘internal’ SEO or optimizing your Intranet site is not that complicated.
SharePoint SEO made easy!
Optimizing your SharePoint site for search is much more straightforward. You just optimize your intranet site so that the right content appears for the right keywords. If your organization has a whole lot of content, updating all those thousands of documents might seem a nightmare. But there are many easy solutions.
There can be an open text field to tag the keywords. But people either fill it with too many keyword variations or leave it blank. Again, it becomes hard to group content with keyword tags. Instead, you could provide your employees with tips and techniques that will make tagging fast and easy. Instead of leaving an open text field, you could ask them to select from a set of keywords that you could suggest based on relevance.
There are even tools to automate your metadata like for example, the BA Insight’s AutoClassifier. All these will help create uniformity while keeping your content organized. When it comes to doing SEO for Intranets, you have 2 schools of thought. Having a perfect Content & SEO strategy is one. Fixing your Search Engine is the other way.
It might be a hard in convincing your management to hire an SEO resource for your Intranet. But at least, if you follow these simple tweaks you could be miles ahead in reaching your goal of a ‘searchable’ Intranet.
If you follow these simple tips you will not hear any more annoying feedbacks that “Nothing in my Intranet is searchable!”
We have yet another article that details 5 best SEO practices for SharePoint. We have discussed SEO settings, Robots.txt, Canonical URLs etc. Feel free to check that article too.
