Sitecore Covid19 Insights

It's unfortunate that we are going through this crisis for past few months. To control the spread of virus, many countries have implemented a strict quarantine measures-, which has impacted a lot of businesses.Many businesses will also be thinking about new ways to get in touch with their their customers in these challenging times, including us ! In this blog, we shall discuss how Sitecore platform can be used to leverage your business during this crisis.

Start with Experience Analytics

Sitecore Experience Analytics shows a variety of reports for marketers. It is essential that you start your analysis from here, make sure you look at various metrics such as page views, conversion rates, engagement values etc. Start collecting all data to analyze how it varies before and during the crisis.
 
 

Keep your users updated with Service Mails

As most of the users and employees are confined to home, it becomes a necessity to keep them updated. Communication with your customers/users will gain trust and makes them aware that you continue to serve them during this challenging time. Sitecore Email Experience Manager helps you to communicate with your users, with really personalized messages across various mailing list.
 
 

Adding a notification and advisories

 It is indeed essential to make sure that your clients are aware of your business plans during this crisis. If you are already using Sitecore Experience Accelerator, creating a simple popup using Cookie warning message component (which is usually used to display GDPR statements) must be easy and really helpful to share important messages. Users can be directed to page that contains specific information on how you are planning to continue your business, this message can also be personalized using Rule engine. 
 
 
You can also show COVID19 helpline, advisories and government guidelines based on country from where the user accesses your website.
 

Check for your organic traffic

During crisis, it is important to deliver right items to the customers, to do that it is necessary understand organic traffic. The keywords from search engines should be monitored and contents should be updated time to time to make it coherent with the search.
Even though the keywords get captured by Sitecore, there is no straight way to look at them.  You can customize your dashboard to show both internal and external searches made. It will also be helpful to look at the referring sites which leads to your Sitecore site to understand how you can market keywords specific to each referring site.
 

Custom Module - Sitecore Covid Insights

 
It is a free module which you can install in your Sitecore instance as it is really helpful in comparing Sitecore metrics along with the COVID19 Statistics. You can access the app from the Marketing Applications Tile section in Launch Pad.
 
You can filter by countries, dates and websites ! It is an easy to use tool, gives you a clear picture how COVID19 has impacted your regional traffic. 
 
 
You can also compare the Keywords that are being searched between selected dates and before COVID19 Crisis. It helps you understand how your users mindset has changed during the crisis. As shown in the below image, it shows the top search engines that bring traffic to your site and it also shows the most searched keywords.
 
 
I hope looking into the visit pattern and keywords search pattern can be a key to tackle the current situation. You can also plan your business in specific countries by comparing the COVID stats along with the Sitecore metrics.
Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran

Sitecore MVP and a Sitecore Certified professional with o ver 8 years of exp in Web Cms like Sitecore, Ektron, Umbraco and Episerver.

Most Expected Sitecore Horizon UI is out !

 

As discussed in our earlier blog, Horizon UI was first announced in Las Vegas Symposium back in 2017, we finally have the initial release of Horizon UI for Sitecore 9.3.

In this article lets discuss on how to configure Horizon UI in Sitecore 9.3 instance (as of now it works only with 9.3 version).

1. Download Horizon UI package

There are two versions available currently, one for On-Premise Deployment and another for Azure Deployment.

Let's try out the on-premise version and see how it looks like.

2. Extract the resource

After the resource is downloaded, unzip the resource files into your local folder.

3. Time to update parameters

 

Open the parameters.ps1 script and then update below set of Parameters. 

ContentManagementInstanceName : The name of the instance of the onpremise content management server.

ContentManagementWebProtocol : The web protocol that is used to access the content management site (this must be https).

SitecoreIdentityServerPhysicalPath : The physical path of the Sitecore Identity server.

SitecoreIdentityServerPoolName : The Sitecore Identity server pool name.

SitecoreIdentityServerSiteName : The Sitecore Identity server site name. LicensePath The Sitecore license file location, including the file name. For example, C:\Project\Files\license.xml

AuthoringHostName : The name of the Horizon website.Due to the expected SameSite cookie attribute changes, we recommend that you set the Horizon website as a subdomain of the Sitecore Content Management instance. For example, if the Sitecore CM instance has the address: https://cmdomain.com, then set this parameter to: authoringhost.cmdomain.com

* Information above is from Sitecore's official Horizon Configuration guide.

Note : it is important that AuthoringHostName is a sub-domain of your Sitecore 9.3 Instance. If not, you will have an SameSite cookie issue and not able to view Horizon UI editing window as mentioned in below image.

4. Install Horizon UI package

Now that the parameters are updated, it is time to install Horizon UI using install.ps1 script found in the same folder as Parameters.ps1

It takes some time to install and finally completes as shown in below image.

5. Time to play with Horizon UI

Now its time to login to your Sitecore 9.3 instance, go to launch pad and click on Horizon (to enter in to whole new world of content authoring)


 

Short demo of Horizon UI :

Sitecore-Horizon-UI

 

With initial review it looks really good and light weight compared to Experience Editor.

Content authors can easily create pages and auto save feature while editing items is really useful. Adding rendering to a page seems to be really easy and it also provides option to edit datasource.Switching devices seems to be really quick and super easy.

Marketers can utilize Page Insights and Simulator feature to understand how their pages are performing. 

As it is an initial release, features like changing Layouts ( Shared/Final) , editing rendering properties, adding new language versions etc are still missing.I hope they will have these features in the upcoming releases but nonetheless it is great tool to work with especially for Marketers !

References:

https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Horizon/93/Sitecore_Horizon_93_Initial_version.aspx 

Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran

Sitecore MVP and a Sitecore Certified professional with o ver 8 years of exp in Web Cms like Sitecore, Ektron, Umbraco and Episerver.

Sitecore Symposium 2019 - Important Developer Takeaways

Every year there are some exciting announcements which are made at Sitecore Symposium and this year was no exception. Theme for this year was "Human Connections In A Digital World" and to cover this topic, Sitecore had lined up number of experts who presented the importance of personalization, emotional intelligence, predictive experience in customer journey and data processing that would help to understand customer in a more personal level. Sitecore also had some key announcements about its new products which made the developer community thrilled.

 

 

This year, the three day symposium was packed with a lot of sessions. A big thanks to all presenters who made this symposium really special with their announcements for Sitecore Community.

In-Short these are the important takeaways for this year.

  1. Sitecore AI :  As the symposium itself themed as "Human Connections In A Digital World" there is no doubt that this the important of all announcements from Sitecore. I am eager to try it out and let’s see how it differs from Sitecore Cortex.
     
  2. Sitecore SaaS Strategy : Sitecore switching its focus towards SaaS and planning to release a SaaS version of Sitecore Experience Platform.
     
  3. SxA Improvements : Sitecore Experience Accelerator is becoming popular as it has significantly improved the time-to-market by reducing the development time needed to design and deploy a component. Front End developers should be happy with the recent changes announced for this year.
     
  4.  Sitecore Horizon : New UI which was announced by Sitecore in it’s Las Vegas Symposium in 2017 is finally going to be integrated.
     
  5. JSSBlazor : Sitecore Javascript Services which can be used along with client side frameworks like Angular / Vue and React is now functional with Microsoft’s open-source web framework Blazor.

Sitecore AI - Automated Personalization

I see this to be an interesting topic as Sitecore is synonymous with Personalization and I find 'Automated Personalization' to be a breakthrough as it would revolutionize personalization. It can automatically identify customer segments, analyze their behavior through their journey and deliver best suited content for each customer !

 

 

Sitecore AI can also provide instant insights, through which marketers can take full control to align customer experience with business goals. It can also understand customer behavior by learning them in their journey and it can automatically deliver the best content to enhance their experience. This framework is powered by Microsoft Azure !

 

 

Developers can try configuring and playing with Sitecore AI as it is planned to be released on December 2019.

Sitecore SaaS Strategy

Finally, we have the announcement for Sitecore Experience platform 9.3 as a SaaS solution, it is targeted to be released in summer 2020. Sitecore's SaaS offering is designed in a way to build digital experience in easier but at a much faster phase. It is also said that users will have an advantage of having the most current version of the product using automatic upgrades. Sitecore Content Hub 3.3, which integrates Digital Asset Management (DAM), Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM) into a single, SaaS-based platform should fully integrated with Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 in SaaS. The SaaS solution is also expected to provide a "New Developer Experience" as developers can now use Asp.Net Core and Javascript to develop new features. Developers can work using VSCode and CLI or Visual Studio. As it features automatic upgrades, there is no more necessity for developers to plan their Sitecore upgrades !

 

 

SxA integration with Scriban and JSS

The SxA is integrated with Scriban making it really easier for front end developers to do the templating. It is lightweight and can be integrated with existing workflow to import it along with their theme. You can make use of this Visual Studio Code extension which provides intellisense for Scriban.

It is also fully integrated with Sitecore JSS and offers JSS-like CLI for an improved workflow. With these key improvements, SXA out-of-the-box should be much more easier to use especially for Front end developers.

 

Sitecore Horizon - New Editing Interface

The new editing interface which provides a combined experience of both Content editor and Experience editor is in preview mode since it was announced in Sitecore Symposium couple of years back. It provides a huge advantage for Sitecore Marketers as they can play with Marketing Toolbox which boasts a lot of features. Sitecore developers might have to improve components in a way that it can be edited using Sitecore Horizon editor. This feature should be integrated with Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 and expected to be released during this winter.

 

JSSBlazor

Sitecore’s JavaScript Services (JSS) is a complete SDK for JavaScript developers which can be used along with Javascript Frameworks like AngularJS / Vue.Js / ReactJs can now be used with Microsoft’s open source client side framework - Blazor. This is currently in a proof of concept version but really interesting for Developers who would like to stick with Microsoft tech stack !

 

This post is part of a Sitecore dedicated series written by Versusmind experts. Interested in our Sitecore Offer ? Visit versusxperience.com and get in touch !


 

References :

Sitecore AI :
https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-experience-platform/sitecore-ai

Sitecore SaaS :
https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/sitecore-saas-strategy

https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/sitecore-saas-strategy/saas-faq

Sitecore SxA :
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xoofx.scriban

https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/2019/11/08/sitecore-symposium-2019-key-improvements-made-to-sxa/

Sitecore Horizon :
https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/2019/11/06/sitecore-symposium-2019-new-editing-experience-in-sitecore/

JSSBlazor :

https://github.com/jss-blazor/jss-blazor

Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran

Sitecore MVP and a Sitecore Certified professional with o ver 8 years of exp in Web Cms like Sitecore, Ektron, Umbraco and Episerver.

Six strategies to improve your Sitecore SEO

It is essential that you deliver right contents to your customers. In-order to do so, it is necessary to follow proper SEO strategies to stay on top of search results. If you do not follow the SEO best practices, it might also cause negative effects that might drop your site in search rankings.
 
Let's discuss some strategies to improve your Sitecore Site for Search engines :
 

Meta-Tags

Meta tags are part of the HTML, it describes the content of your page to search engines. Make sure your Sitecore pages have the below listed meta-tags as fields within your page templates and design renderings which can add these tags when HTML is built.

  • Title Tag

    <title>Sitecore SEO Strategies</title>

    Make sure all your Sitecore pages have a proper title that is well under 70 characters long and to limit the character length try to use character savers like '&' instead of 'And' , '|' instead of 'Or'  etc. Most importantly, avoid duplicate Titles as much as possible, try to maintain unique names  for pages.
     

  • Meta Description

    <meta name="description" content="Six strategies to improve your Sitecore SEO">

    Meta description had to be less than 160 characters but it has been improved to a max 300 characters. Even though description tag does not determine your ranking, it improves the click through rate when it is attractive. So remember to make it attractive by keeping the length of characters less than 300.

    Sitecore SEO Google Search

     

  • Canonical and Alternate tags

    <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.yoursitecoredomain.com";>

    You might often end up having multiple URLs for a same page. It is necessary to inform Search engines to consider all these URLs as same page.
    The canonical tag is used to give the preferred URL for search engines to use when returning the page in the search results.

    For example, you might have a page with several minor variations, or query parameters that are referenced in a different way in different links ex: https://www.yourdomain.com?id=3658 , https://www.yourdomain.com/home.aspx . As the canonical value is set to "https://www.yourdomain.com"
    Search engines will now link all your search results to this link instead of other variants.

    The alternate tag is used to point to a version of the page that has been translated into another language. For example, you could have multiple language translations for same page.

    <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.yoursitecoredomain.com/en"; hreflang="x-default">
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.yoursitecoredomain.com/en"; hreflang="en">
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.yoursitecoredomain.com/de-de"; hreflang="de-DE">
    <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.yoursitecoredomain.com/es-es"; hreflang="es-ES">

    When regional users say Spanish, search for contents they will be sent to "es-Es" page. This is important to retain your regional users and serve translated pages.
     

  • Robots meta tag

    <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">

    The tag will inform search engines which pages on your site should be indexed, which should not and much more (please go through below list of attributes). Even though these can be controlled in "robots.txt", but it is generally used in pages to prevent search engines from indexing it.
    These attributes that will intimate Google while crawling your pages.

    Noindex — page is not indexed
    Nofollow — It prevents search engines from following ALL the links on the page
    Nosnippet — It will prevent description of your page in appearing in search results
    Noarchive — prevents a cached copy of the page to appear in search results 

    I hope you can now understand the power of robots, it is more than just index and noindex.
     

  • Social Media Meta Tags (Open Graph, Twitter Cards)

    <meta property="og:url" content="https://www.yoursitecoresite.com/2011/12/08/famous-blog/"; />
    <meta property="og:title" content="Famous Blog" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="Famous blog created in my site to promote the recent changes in management blah blah" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="https://www.yoursitecoresite.com/images/2011/12/08/famousblog.jpg"; />

    Facebook introduces OG tags back in 2010 and it is further recognized by other major social media platforms (LinkedIn, Google+, etc.). OG tags is a way to manage how your page information is represented when shared via social channels. This possibility may help you enhance the performance of your links on social media, thus driving more click-throughs and increasing conversions. It is mandatory to have them when you do extensive social media campaigns. In below image, you can notice how the image and title of the page is picked up automatically when I tried to share a blog in LinkedIn.

    OG Card Sitecore SEO

    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
    <meta name="twitter:site" content="@yoursitecoresite" />
    <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@yoursitecoresite" />

    Twitter cards are similar to OG tags (title, description, image, etc.), but they are used by Twitter. These tags will make your tweet look different from common text tweets as they are automatically pre-built  when your customer tweets about your page.

    Twitter Card Sitecore SEO

 

Use HTML5 Semantic elements

Many miss out that HTML semantics are important when Sitecore components are designed. For example when a blog component is designed, it is important that it is wrapped up within article tag and when a menu is designed it should be wrapped up within nav tag.

These new HTML5 tags are created to classify different type of contents. Search engines use these tags to categorize your content and it improves your search rankings.

  • <article>: The  tag makes it easy to mark new blog posts or article entries in an online publication. Search engines can put more weight on any content wrapped with this tag. It also helps to clean up the HTML code by reducing the use of <div> tags.
  • <aside>: An <aside> tag can be like a section tag, but one that focuses on secondary content such as sidebar, or a post-article call to action might be a good place to use <aside> tags.
  • <section>: Blog posts are typically broken into different sections to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. The <section> tag can be used to specify these subsections of your content, each with their own separate HTML heading.
  • <header>: The <header> tag is similar to the <h1> tag in that it can be used to specify the header of a page. But it can also be used to indicate the header section of a page and can even contain navigation links and other relevant text.
  • <footer>: While not as useful as the <header> tag, the <footer> tag still offers SEO benefits as it can be used to specify content in the footer section of a website such as company information and other useful links. Each page can even have its own footer section.
  • <nav>: Navigation is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of a website. The <nav> tag can be used to specify links on a page such in the main site navigation or for pagination.
  • <video>: The <video> tag is easily one of the most useful tags as it allows for cross-browser compatibility to display videos without having to use Flash. HTML5 also makes it possible to include additional information about the video such as captions and subtitles.
 

Using Schema.org Item types

         Identify different Schemas or items types that are used in your Sitecore site. You can find complete list of Item types that Schema.org supports https://schema.org/docs/full.html. 
      
 
SCHEMAORG Sitecore SEO
        
         In below table, I have documented the list of Sitecore page templates that can be categorized into various Schema Itemtypes. I have also mentioned item properties that can be used under each type of Sitecore Pages.
 
 
Page Templates in Sitecore
Schema Item Type
 Schema Item Properties
Home,
Campaign Page,
Contact Us Page,
Testimonial Page,
Form page ..
About ,headline, description, name, image, text, Url
 
 
 
 
Event Page
About, headline, name, description, image, text, Url, startdate, endDate, eventStatus
News Page
NewsArticle
About, headline, name, description, image, text, Url, dateline, articleBody
articleSection, backStore
Press Release Page
Article
About, headline, name, description,image, text, Url, articleBody, articleSection, backStore
Blog Page
About, headline, name, description, image, text, Url, Blogpost, Author, Headline, backStore
Blog Author Page
About, headline, name, description, image, text, Url, additionalName, address, Award
Birthdate, birthPlace, Brand, Email, familyName, Gender, givenName, telephone, worksFor, workLocation
Product Page
About, headline, name, description, image, text, Url, additionalProperty, Brand, Category, Color, Depth, Model, productID, Sku, productionDate, releaseDate, Weight, Width
 
 
 
 

Up to Date Sitemap

It is recommended to have Sitemap auto generated and up to date. Also make sure to generate sitemap for each of your languages in a multi-language Sitecore instance. 

You can notice that we have designed various processors and events to automate Sitemap generation. Every time a content is published, deleted or created - a Sitemap job runs to update the list of pages within Sitemap.xml. Search engines can now gather latest set of URLs when it crawls your site each time.
 

  1. <configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  2.     <sitecore>
  3.         <sitemap>
  4.             <site name="YourSitecoreSite" />
  5.         </sitemap>
  6.         <pipelines>
  7.             <createSitemapXml>
  8.                 <processor type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.SitemapXmlProcessor, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap">
  9.                     <param desc="indexName">sitecore_web_index</param>
  10.                     <param desc="dataBase">web</param>
  11.                 </processor>
  12.                 <!-- Add more processors here to index other kinds of data -->
  13.             </createSitemapXml>
  14.             <httpRequestBegin>
  15.                 <processor patch:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel']" type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.SitemapRequestProcessor, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap">
  16.                 </processor>
  17.                 <processor patch:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel']" type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.RobotsTextProcessor, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap">
  18.                 </processor>
  19.             </httpRequestBegin>
  20.         </pipelines>
  21.         <events>
  22.             <event name="indexing:updateditem">
  23.                 <handler type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.PublishEndProcess, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap" method="UpdateSitemapRemote" />
  24.             </event>
  25.             <event name="indexing:deleteitem">
  26.                 <handler type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.PublishEndProcess, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap" method="UpdateSitemapRemote" />
  27.             </event>
  28.             <event name="indexing:added">
  29.                 <handler type="Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap.Pipelines.Processors.PublishEndProcess, Versusmind.Foundation.Sitemap" method="UpdateSitemapRemote" />
  30.             </event>
  31.         </events>
  32.         <settings>
  33.             <setting name="robotsFolder" value="/Site Settings/Robots" />
  34.             <!--Change context DB based on CM and CD-->
  35.             <setting name="sitemap.contextDatabase" value="web" />
  36.             <setting name="sitemap.contextIndex" value="sitecore_web_index" />
  37.         </settings>
  38.     </sitecore>
  39. </configuration>

Page Retirement Plan with proper redirection

Many content authors in Sitecore move / rename or delete pages without knowing the consequences. Any of these activities will modify the URL making the old link broken.

Redirects Sitecore SEO

ex: let's say you have content  "Home/Products/Your famous product" . The URL will be something like this --> "https://www.yoursitecoresite.com/products/your-famous-product"

Renaming it to "Your Popular product" will modify its URL to https://www.yoursitecoresite.com/products/your-popular-product
Moving it to Home folder will update URL to https://www.yoursitecoresite.com/your-famous-product
Deleting the page will make the previous URL broken.

If any of  your visitors have bookmarked previously might end up seeing a 404 Not Found Page. Automate the redirects when any of the above happens so that visitors can land in proper pages instead of viewing the 404 Page. This way, they will end up staying in your site than leaving 

Optimize images and page load time

Google has indicated site speed is one of the indicator for search ranking. Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.

Sitecore Image Optimizer

Moreover, it is essential to have shorter page load times to improve user experience. Do not bloat your page with too many components, it can also affect the user experience. Use tools like Dianoga to optimize images within Sitecore or please have a look at my repository to optimize images when it is uploaded (Sitecore Image Compression)  if you need to optimize them when it is uploaded to media library.

 

I hope you have a clear understanding of how Sitecore SEO works. You can get in touch with us and we can have a conversation on how to achieve your marketing goals by optimizing your web site's SEO !

 

Ramkumar Nambhi Krishnan Dhinakaran

Sitecore MVP and a Sitecore Certified professional with o ver 8 years of exp in Web Cms like Sitecore, Ektron, Umbraco and Episerver.

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