Optimizing Your Home Page Url for SEO

mojoPortal content management system is designed to automatically produce excellent SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by using friendly urls and by adding a canonical url link to tell search engines the authoritative url for the page even it responds to multiple urls.

The home page of a site can be optimized a little further according to your tastes, and it illustrates the purpose of canonical urls. The home page in mojoPortal CMS is not a special page, it has no specific property that makes it the home page other than the fact that it is the root level page with the lowest sort order so it is the default page of the site. You are free to move pages around in the site hierarchy and any page could be moved to the home page spot and become the home page of your site, however typically once you establish your home page you should not change it.

Because the home page is the default page of your site it will be shown for 3 different urls http://yoursiteroot/, http://yoursiteroot/Default.aspx, and typically also for http://yoursiteroot/home.aspx

Those who know a little about SEO will immediately see a problem with that because they are afraid that google will dilute the page rank across those 3 different urls. However this is not what happens because we automatically create a canonical link in the head, which tells google and other search engines that the official url for the page is http://yoursiteroot/home.aspx

Now you may prefer that the official canonical url for your home page should be http://yoursiteroot/ instead of http://yoursiteroot/home.aspx. You can do this by going into the page settings for your home page, on the "Search Engine Optimization" tab in page settings you will see a textbox where you can override the canonical url and change it to "http://yoursiteroot/"

Some people like to also change the url for the home page from ~/home.aspx to just ~/, and you can do this if you want to but it is really not necessary since the canonical link clarifies the preferred url for the page and major search engines will respect the canonical link.