CMS Best Practices: SEO-friendly URLs in Sitecore .NET

non~linear clients often request information from us on how to manage SEO-friendly URLs, both for general website pages and for time-sensitive marketing campaigns.

The questions that concern most of our clients are:

1. How do I find the complete list of aliased URLs that are currently running on my site?
2. How can I find out how many visitors have accessed a specific, aliased URL?
3. I have a marketing campaign running, how can I set up a scheduled alias?

Most CMS products offer a URL alias feature; however, very few mid-market offerings can address all of the above requests. But with minimal configuration and some help from Google Analytics, Sitecore can offer these functions with surprising flexibility.

For the skeptics among you, let me outline how your marketing staff could easily create aliases for campaigns in Sitecore, on demand, without any intervention from IT:

John is a Marketing Manager for Acme. Acme is having a big sale on the 100 Rocket for the month of January, and John would like to set up a promotional URL at www.acme.com/rocket100 that takes any visitors to the main product page found at www.acme.com/products/rockets/100series/overview.aspx.

John would like to have this alias start operating on January 1 (the start date of the sale), and be disabled on February 2 (one day after the sale ends). At the end of the sale, John will need to know how many visitors accessed the promotional URL to gauge effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

This is what John should do:

1. Logging into Sitecore, John will access the Marketing Manager’s area of the site. Here, he can see all the existing aliases and create a new one using the floating toolbar – which he does.
2. Entering “rocket100” as the name of the alias, John then selects the main product page for the Acme 100 rocket as the destination for the alias.
3. John only wants this alias to be effective from January 1 to February 1, so he uses Sitecore’s “publication date control” to specify the date range.
4. When John hits the save button, Sitecore takes over and creates a new URL on the site that will activate on January 1 and include all the necessary Google Analytics code to track the URL’s activity.
5. At midnight on February 2, Sitecore will automatically deactivate the alias.

While I used Sitecore and Google Analytics as the example in this post, the same approach could be applied in Ektron, RedDot or OpenCMS-based sites, using almost any comprehensive analytics package.