How to optimise your website for search engines. SEO in Umbraco

Posted written by Paul Seal on February 14, 2017 Tips

About this post

This post shows you how you can add the meta tags which are required for search engines and sharing on facebook and twitter.

Watch the video

You can follow along with the video for instructions on what to do in the umbraco back end and for more explanation about the code.

Watch on YouTube

Model

Create a model to hold the information

namespace FionaWhitfieldArt.Models
{
    public class MetaDataModel
    {
        public string Url { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Description { get; set; }
        public string Keywords { get; set; }
        public string ImageUrl { get; set; }
    }
}

View

Add this RenderAction call in head of the main View, in my case it is called WebBase.cshtml

<head>
    @{ Html.RenderAction("RenderMetaData", "SiteLayout"); }
</head>

Partial View

Create a partial view to render the model data

@model FionaWhitfieldArt.Models.MetaDataModel

<title>@Model.Title</title>

<meta name="description" content="@Model.Description" />
<meta name="keywords" content="@Model.Keywords" />
<meta name="author" content="Fiona Whitfield" />

<!-- Facebook and Twitter integration -->
<meta property="og:title" content="@Model.Title" />
<meta property="og:image" content="@Model.ImageUrl" />
<meta property="og:url" content="@Model.Url" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Fiona Whitfield Art" />
<meta property="og:description" content="@Model.Description" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="@Model.Title" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="@Model.ImageUrl" />
<meta name="twitter:url" content="@Model.Url" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />

<link rel="canonical" href="@Model.Url" >

Controller

Create a method in the Controller

using Umbraco.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using FionaWhitfieldArt.Models;
using Umbraco.Core.Models;
using Umbraco.Web;

namespace FionaWhitfieldArt.Controllers
{
    public class SiteLayoutController : SurfaceController
    {
        private string PartialViewPath(string name)
        {
            return $"~/Views/Partials/SiteLayout/{name}.cshtml";
        }

        public ActionResult RenderMetaData()
        {
            MetaDataModel model = new MetaDataModel();
            IPublishedContent homePage = CurrentPage.AncestorOrSelf("home");
            string domainAddress = homePage.UrlWithDomain();
            string title = CurrentPage.GetPropertyValue<string>("title");
            model.Title = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(title) ? title : CurrentPage.Name;
            model.Description = CurrentPage.HasProperty("description") ? CurrentPage.GetPropertyValue<string>("description") : null;
            model.Keywords = CurrentPage.HasProperty("keywords") ? CurrentPage.GetPropertyValue<string>("keywords") : null;
            if(CurrentPage.HasProperty("socialShareImage"))
            {
                int mediaId = CurrentPage.GetPropertyValue<int>("socialShareImage");
                var mediaItem = Umbraco.Media(mediaId);
                model.ImageUrl = $"{domainAddress.TrimEnd('/')}{mediaItem.Url}";
            }         
            model.Url = CurrentPage.UrlWithDomain();
            return PartialView(PartialViewPath("_MetaData"), model);
        }

    }
}

I hope this has helped you, let me know in the comments if you need any further help.