5 Umbraco SEO Packages You Need Right Now

As an Umbraco Certified Gold Partner, Marcel Digital chooses the Umbraco CMS to give our clients the full control and versatility needed to bring their website vision to life. Beyond the stellar customization abilities of even the most basic of Umbraco CMS implementations, Umbraco's collaborative developer community has created thousands of packages and plugins to help both end users and developers provide a one of a kind experience.

As one of the leading and most recognized SEO consulting agencies in the United States, we're always partnering with our web development team to create SEO friendly Umbraco websites, and regularly use the community's packages and plugins to do so.

Below, you'll find 5 Umbraco SEO packages that we use both internally to develop SEO friendly Umbraco websites and also recommend to those outside of our agency to help them achieve greater organic visibility for their Umbraco websites and brand. Without further adieu...

SEO Starter Kit

Created and developed by Marcel Digital's own Umbraco Master, Alex Vilmur, we wanted to give our clients and Umbraco users more control over their website's metadata, as well as other SEO tags and elements. So, Alex used his Umbraco expertise and technical knowledge to create the SEO Starter Kit for Umbraco. This package gives developers and users alike to quickly create SEO friendly websites and update their page's individual SEO elements for greater search engine visibility.

Some of the features of the SEO Starter Kit for Umbraco include:

• Creating and editing title tags (SEO and user-friendly page titles in a snap)
• Creating and editing meta descriptions (The little paragraph under page titles in search engine results - boost your clicks!)
• Creating and editing canonical tags (Tell search engines which URL should rank)
• Setting index and follow robots meta tags for your content (Tell search engines which content should or should not rank)
• Allowing or omitting a page from being listed in your sitemap XML (Don't want a web page in your sitemap? Simply check a box!)

If you'd like to learn more about this particular package, view the SEO Starter Kit for Umbraco documentation page located here.

301 URL Tracker

Ensuring that your users and search engines find can your content is paramount to a successful SEO campaign. If you move content to a new URL, remove URLs, or if a URL breaks, you need to be able to redirect the old URL to the most relevant new URL, both to keep users happy and to let search engines know the content has moved so it can be ranked accordingly. The 301 URL Tracker for Umbraco gives users and developers the ability to stay on top of their redirects, broken URLs, as well as the server codes that are delivered when a page is missing or removed.

The features of 301 URL Tracker for Umbraco include:

• URL changes tracker (Stay on top of URL changes on your site)
• Server code tracker (Are pages 404ing or 302ing? Keep track of them!)
• Redirect creation and edits (Full ability to control your website's redirects)
• Redirect requests and recommendations (Recommendations and requests for redirects based on a URL)
• Query string matching 

And more! If you're looking for the source code for this package, you can get that here.

SEO Checker

Finding a comprehensive SEO package or plugin for any CMS is quite difficult, but with the SEO Checker for Umbraco CMS, you get a more in-depth and full scope look into issues that are occurring on your website, how you are performing against Google's best practices, as well as what opportunities you have to gain greater organic visibility. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Features included in the SEO Checker for Umbraco:

• Validate pages against Google's SEO best practices and starter guide (Always stay in Google's good graces)
• Snippet previews (Including keyword usage in content and meta information)
• Report inbound link issues (Find broken links pointing to your site and on your site)
• Manage redirects (Create and update redirects on your site - perfect for when migrating a site)
• Easy URL rewriting (Create user and SEO friendly URLs in a snap)

To install this Umbraco package, head over to Nuget to learn more!

Umbraco XML Sitemap

A sitemap XML is a document that helps search engines better understand what content is on your website, what content you’d like to have indexed, and how it should prioritize the content that is on your website. You can then upload this to Google Search Console so it can be crawled and indexed (you can also do the same with Bing). As the Umbraco CMS does not offer an out of the box functionality that creates a sitemap XML for your website, our own Alex Vilmur (in-house Umbraco Master and guru) created a package that generates a sitemap XML for you! The package is called (cleverly enough) Umbraco Sitemap XML.

You can learn more about the Umbraco Sitemap XML package and how it's installed here!

AMP For Umbraco

Lastly, we list yet another Alex Vilmur (Marcel Digital's own Umbraco Master) created package for Umbraco. In October of 2015, Google announced via its blog it's partnership with the Accelerated Mobile Pages (otherwise known as AMP) project to improve the mobile web experience by stripping down code bloat (such as too much HTML, JS, and CSS) to increase the speed of pages browsed on a mobile device. The goal of this project was to ensure that code worked across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere instantly, no matter what kind of mobile device or tablet you are using.

As Umbraco does not have an out of the box solution for AMP, and as AMP is an SEO best practice that we value deeply at Marcel Digital, Alex created a package that allows you to install AMP code on your website so that your mobile site meets Google's mobile best practices and passes their mobile friendly test. Having this code on your website will ensure that your web pages render properly on mobile devices, as well as provide a clean and fast user experience.

To learn more about the AMP for Umbraco plugin, check out Alex's blog post and installation instructions here!

** NOTE: You probably noticed that we listed three Umbraco packages created by Marcel Digital. If you'd like to learn more above these at a more in depth level, visit the links about or check out our blog post here! Also, if you're not technical inclined for installing these packages or don't have a resource, give us a shout below! **

If you're in search of a new CMS, Marcel Digital asks that you consider Umbraco CMS, otherwise known as "The Friendly CMS". Marcel Digital is a digital marketing agency staffing both Umbraco Masters and Umbraco Professionals, so whether your needs are technical, like development and maintenance, or usability, as in training and ongoing support, we've got you covered. Have questions or interest in our services? Feel free to reach out to Marcel Digital today and our experts will happily get back to you! We're excited to hear your story and show you how Marcel Digital and Umbraco CMS can satisfy your digital needs!