SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

As Ryan Caldwell said in the comments of "Why Bloggers Need SEO":

SEO is to blogging like editing is to writing a book. You can’t write a good book without editing. You can’t write a good blog without SEO. Editing sharpens the focus of a book. SEO sharpens the focus of a blog. Editing happens both as a separate act and as an “in the process” act. SEO can be done both in the act of blogging (choosing a good headline), and separately (off-site linkage, etc.)

we share the same point and our DNN blog module [SunBlogNuke] also apply the exact principle.

SunBlogNuke, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database. SunBlogNuke comes with several built in search optimization tools. If you had ignored them, I would like to show you them as follows:

1. The ability to create apparently static URLs called permalinks.

   There exist a filed called [Post Slug] in SunBlogNuke. With it our blog platform will create apparently static URLs called permalinks with this post title. Please get the more information about Post Slug from the previous post 5 Killer Features will be Available on SunBlogNuke.

2. Place the title of the post in the page title tag.

   There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles - so make sure you get them right. Fortunately SunBlogNuke have automatically done it for you. Not only it places the title of the post in the page title tag, but also it includes a flexible option that postfix the page titles with blog name. For example, my post title is "Search Engine Optimization for DNN Blog Module” and our blog name "SunBlogNuke Team Blog", when you visit the post the page title will formatted as "Search Engine Optimization for DNN Blog Module - SunBlogNuke Team Blog". Yes, you can turn it off if you think that it will more SEO without the blog name. Indeed there is a point that if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing. You can get more SEO tips about blog title from this post 10 Tips to Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Titles.

3. Auto Generate Meta Description

   You should know that it is essential to include the META Description tag on all your web pages for better search engine indexing. But out dilemma is, how do we populate the “content” section of the META description dynamically based on what content we’re viewing?  Simple — we use a combination of conditional tags and a custom loop to pull either the page title (if we’re on the homepage) or the description (if we’re in a single post). With that our blog platform will create such unique description tags for each post page. Usually, most bloggers don’t take advantage of the use of the “optional description” section of their Write Post panel. But if you want to exercise even more control over what gets displayed on the search engine results page(SERP) for content, then you need to be filling this section out.  If it’s blank, your post description will just be the first 150 (that is the max length for Meta Description) characters in your post.

4. Meta keywords support

   The SunBlogNuke also support Meta keywords with a combination of page key words and all tags of each post. But recently Google Confirms Meta Keywords Tag Not used for Rankings, you just ignore it and let it there now.

Though SunBlogNuke comes with several built-in features for SEO, please keep in mind that “Content is King”. The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog. Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written - of course they do this by passing on the link to your post and often they’ll do it in a way that helps your search rankings (on their own blog for example).

Additional resources about DNN SEO:

DNN SEO Quickstart Guide

DNN SEO Case Study Part 2

Here I will share you how to integrate twitter with DNN website or DNN blog module, like our SunBlogNuke module. It will help bridge the gap between blog posts and IM. It's also a great way to keep people informed quickly and easily.

With our DNN blog module SunBlogNuke v2.4.9, we have enhanced the featured widget module for more scenes, like the latest posts or top posts. This is a really nice way to help internal linking in your site and a great way to make sure that your older, but more popular posts continue to receive plenty of internal link love to keep them ranking in the search engines. In the mean time, it supports more customizations.

By the enhanced widget module, you will can include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar. That provides an at-a-glance index for your latest posts. Especially if you write long posts, the recent posts section allows readers to see what you’ve been up to without scrolling down a lengthy page.

Also you can include Top Viewed Posts section. You know that once your classic posts leave the home page, they’re often buried in your site. Like displaying trophies on a mantle, showcasing your classic posts allows more readers to find and enjoy them. Together with the core related post feature, your readers will get the more information from your blog and doing so can increase the page views per reader.

It’s now very easy to do this yourself. Here’s how to apply it:

1) Add the "Featured Entries Widget" module in the sidebar of your blog.

2) The module will show the default settings with your recent posts but you have more controls to customize your layout and view mode. Please select the "Render Settings" from the left top menu to enter the administrative panel. The options are pretty clear – here’s the screenshots of the admin screen:

3) Just configure your customized settings and click "update" to apply it. That’s all. :)

Good luck and happy writing.

The SunBlog team

Have you ever seen a blogger mention how important it is to schedule posts ahead? You know that there is a certain time in a day when each site gets its most amount of users or maybe you are going for a one week vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your blog. How do you fix these problems? Now it is generally a good idea to have a few posts scheduled ahead in case those things come up. If you are a SunBlogNuke user, you might not know that you have the ability to schedule posts ahead. It is actually quite easy! In addition to scheduling posts ahead, you can use old dates if you want your post to be dated sometime in the past.

Here is how to schedule your posts to be published at a different time and/or date:

1. Write your post.
2. Go to where it says PublishDate on the bottom of your Write panel and adjust the time/date to reflect when you would like your post to be published. You will want to verify that your blog’s time is set up correctly to ensure the post appears when you want it to.
3. Click "Save & Publish" to publish the post.
4. The post will now appear in the Manage posts panel, but will not show on your site until the designated date/time. If you date it into the past, it will post right away and show the designated date/time.

This is a useful way to keep a few posts saved for a rainy day or to keep content showing up if an illness puts you out of commission for a while. You can also experiment with posting times to see what works best for you and your readers. It is more important for SEO if there exists scheduled posts in your website. Google love website and blog with continuous post and updates. If you are posting more then 8 post a day and then for the next few days no post, You are actually hurting your website authority and page rank. With scheduling you can keep your blog running and your blog will never run out of the post. Maybe you should know the fact that Schedule your Posts for the Best Success.

Good luck and happy writing.

The SunBlogNuke team

I'm pleased to announce that the latest building for SunBlogNuke will be available later. This version will be identified v2.4.8. It includes the 5 killer features as follows:

1. Captcha Feature

To prevent spammers from using web bots to automatically submit bogus comments, usually for the purpose of raising search engine ranks of some website (e.g., "buy penny stocks here"), we finally implemented the Captcha feature. By using a CAPTCHA, only humans can enter comments on a blog. There is no need to make users sign up before they enter a comment, and no legitimate comments are ever lost! Also you turn off/on in discussion settings panel as long as you would like to. Take a look at the screenshot and it is with such funny way:

2. Alternative Feed Url

Right now you can create a alternative feed url for your blog feed, for example, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/username. Then you will easily manipulate your current feed and other aggregate feeds.

3. Post slug

If you used the SunBlogNuke before, you should know that there exists the EntryName filed. Actually it is the initial Post slug and now it is totally replaced. By default, the post slug will be the blog post’s title provide you check the option[Show SEO Friendly URL].  For example, by default, this would post having the following URL:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/5-Killer-Features-will-be-Available-on-SunBlogNuke.aspx

Unfortunately, this is not a very search engine friendly URL, as many of the keywords are at the end of the URL.  By setting my own custom post slug, I am able to create a better URL for my post:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/Killer-Features-SunBlogNuke.aspx

In this case, my post title focuses on the keywords for this post, creating more emphasis on them.  The great thing about this tip is it takes a very minimal amount of time to do and will become second nature once you’ve turned it into a habit. Also we provide the utility feature that you can extract the post slug from title and adjust it into your expected value.

4. Default Post Category

When you post at your blog and forget to assign any category to it, SunBlogNuke itself assigns a category to it. This is called the “default post category”. The default category is initially "Uncategorized". However, you can change this default category in Writing Setting Panel:

5. Support author options in WLW

Until now we have enhanced more to support the WLW, this time we add ability to support author options in WLW. So you assign the author for the current post. It is useful when you are the blog owner or editor role.

Well, that’s all. Please look forward to our release for this building which including so many enhancements.

Good luck and happy writing.

The SunBlog team

There is a setting property in the wlwmanifest.xml depending on the feature. Please note that setting this value to true will allow the <!--more—> tag in your WLW. The collection page and simple entry partial were modified to have a "Read More" link whenever there is extended content.

Live Writer has built in support for splitting entries as seen in the picture to the below.

Also you can see the more features integrated with WLW, for example, keyword, category and slug etc. :)

Updated: This post was out of date and please refer to the new tutorial here - Integrated with Window Live Writer.

In the last two posts, we had described how to install, configure and use the "SunBlog" module in DotNetNuke(DNN) platform. Here we will continue to tell you how to write your post of "SunBlog" with Window Live Writer(WLW). You know, the Window Live Writer is so great for post management of web blog that "SunBlog" had supported this killer feature natively. And another reason is that editing a long blog post in the FCK editor is painful.  Anyone who has ever lost a blog post because of a login timeout knows just how painful it truly can be. I spend an hour or more writing my blog posts and to have it just disappear is enough to make you cry. Ok, if you haven't yet set up your WLW to post to your blog, now let us go ahead. It's really easy. Here's the simple steps below:

1. Start WLW, and progress through the first couple of steps, indicating you already have a blog, and that it's with 'Another Blog Service'.
2. Enter your blog URL and user account which related with your blog.
3. Select "MetaWeblog API" as the type of weblog.
4. Enter your Blog Posting Url: this is pretty easy to get. The default Url for SunBlog Should be "http://www.yourdomain.com/MetaWeblog.ashx" (Replaced with "http://www.yourdomain.com/DesktopModules/SunBlog/MetaWeblog.ashx" in v2.3.6 or "http://www.yourdomain.com/MetaWeblog.aspx" in latest version). Please make sure that you replace the "yourdomain.com" with your actual website domain.

After doing this, you should be good to blog!

Good luck blogging!

Since the version 2.4.x, we have enhance SunBlog greatly and try to make it as a ultimate content workflow platform. So we have updated the new installation guide for the new SunBlog. It will be easier and quicker for your life.