Tag: URL

SEO Friendly URL's in Sitecore

As silly as it seams to the average developer, URL's are an important factor when it comes to SEO. As ridiculous as some of the requirements are (like not having spaces in a URL) they are unfortunately requirements that we have to live with. Here's how to deal with not having upper case letters in a URL, replacing spaces with hyphens and getting rid of that pesky aspx extension.

Removing Spaces from a URL

A space in a URL actually gets translated to %20, which for the average user isn't very readable. I would argue that as well as doing the translation, browsers could actually just hide this fact from users, and Google could also hide it as well. But alas that hasn't happened and the accepted solution is to replace spaces with a hyphen.

Within a patch config file add the following:

1<encodeNameReplacements>
2  <replace mode="on" find=" " replaceWith="-" />
3</encodeNameReplacements>

What this will do is replace every space in an items name with a hyphen as links are rendered. When a request comes into Sitecore it will also replace all hyphens with a space, so that the URL's still resolve.

However this does cause a problem for any items you have that already had a hyphen in them. Sadly the best we can do for this is to stop content editors including hyphens in item names with the following config patch:

1<settings>
2  <setting name="InvalidItemNameChars">
3    <patch:attribute name="value">\/:?&amp;quot;&amp;lt;&amp;gt;|[]-</patch:attribute>
4  </setting>
5</settings>

Make URLs all lower case

Believe it or not URL's are actually case sensitive. Maybe not in the Windows / IIS world, but with Linux and the rest of the web they are. So the simplest solution is to make all the URL's on the site lower case.

Sitecore 6.6 and above

If your using Sitecore 6.6 or above then you in luck, there's a config setting on the linkManager to set all urls to lower case

1<linkManager defaultProvider="sitecore">
2  <providers>
3    <add name="sitecore">
4      <patch:attribute name="lowercaseUrls">true</patch:attribute>
5    </add>
6  </providers>
7</linkManager>

Sitecore 6.5 and below

If you using 6.5 or below you need to do a little more work.

One way is using the same encodeNameReplacements config as we used before and replace every upper case letter in the alphabet with the lower case equivalent.

1<encodeNameReplacements>
2  <replace mode="on" find="A" replaceWith="a" />
3  <replace mode="on" find="B" replaceWith="b" />
4  <replace mode="on" find="C" replaceWith="c" />
5  <replace mode="on" find="D" replaceWith="d" />
6</encodeNameReplacements>

Personally this doesn't seen the nicest solution and I expect will lead to a lot of replace functions being called.

Another solution is to create a class that overrides the Sitecores LinkProvider and simply makes the result of GetItemUrl lowercase

1namespace YourNamespace.Providers
2{
3    public class LinkProvider : Sitecore.Links.LinkProvider
4    {
5        public override string GetItemUrl(Sitecore.Data.Items.Item item, Sitecore.Links.UrlOptions urlOptions)
6        {
7            return base.GetItemUrl(item, urlOptions).ToLower();
8        }
9    }
10}

And then add a patch config to tell Sitecore to use your LinkManager rather than the default.

1<linkManager defaultProvider="sitecore">
2  <providers>
3    <add name="sitecore">
4      <patch:attribute name="type">YourNamespace.Providers.LinkProvider, YourProjectName</patch:attribute>
5    </add>
6  </providers>
7</linkManager>

Getting rid of the aspx extension

By default Sitecore puts a .aspx extension on the end of a url. Changing it is just a config setting:

1<linkManager defaultProvider="sitecore">
2  <providers>
3    <add name="sitecore">
4      <patch:attribute name="addAspxExtension">false</patch:attribute>
5    </add>
6  </providers>
7</linkManager>

Getting the URL of a Sitecore Item

You may expect a Sitecore Item to contain a property for its URL, however to actually get the URL of an item you need to use the LinkManager class.

There are also a few different options when getting an items URL, such as if you include the language code or not.

The following example gets the URL for an item with no language code and has a path relative to the site it is in. This is useful when your Sitecore instance may have multiple sites running and your home node isn't at the root of the content tree.

1Sitecore.Links.UrlOptions urlOptions = new Sitecore.Links.UrlOptions(); urlOptions.SiteResolving = true; urlOptions.LanguageEmbedding = Sitecore.Links.LanguageEmbedding.Never; string url = Sitecore.Links.LinkManager.GetItemUrl(item, urlOptions);

Item and Field Names in Sitecore

Item and Field names in Sitecore might sound like a simple subject, but there are a few options that you may not be aware of.

Item Names

When you create an item in Sitecore it will ask you for a name to give the item. That name then appears in the content tree and at the top of the details pane to identify what your looking at.

It's also used for the URL in the front end of your site.

All fairly basic stuff. However in this example you will see that I've placed a hyphen between "Company" and "News" to make the the URL a little more friendly, rather than having a space or no gap at all. While good for the URL it comes at a sacrifice to the admin experience where a gap would be nicer.

On a multilingual site the URL's are also still using this same name. If your languages are English and US English that may be ok, but if your second language is French then they would probably prefer a URL in French.

Display Names

This is where Display Names come in. By setting a Display Name for your item you can configure a name to show in the admin that contains the space which can also differ per language.

However at this point the URL on the front end of your site will still be "Company News". Through a config setting though you can set Sitecore to use item display names rather than the item name when constructing a URL.

1<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
2  <sitecore>
3    <linkManager>
4      <providers>
5        <add name="sitecore">
6          <patch:attribute name="useDisplayName">true</patch:attribute>
7        </add>
8      </providers>
9    </linkManager>
10  </sitecore>
11</configuration>

Of course at this point your URL will be back to having a space within it.

Field Names

When you define a template in Sitecore you create add a section name and then add a field within that section. All simple stuff, however what you generally find is you have to prefix the name of your fields with the name of the section. This is because when it comes to accessing the field data in code, the sections don't exist and you need a way to avoid having two fields just called "Title" or "Text".

While this solves the issue from a code perspective, for content editors it's far from ideal.

Fortunately there is a solution to this. By navigating to the actual field item within the content tree, we can specify a Title for the field that will be used in the editor rather than its name.

On top of that if you click the Configure tab and select Help, you can enter some help text that will appear next to the field name in the content editor.