Carrying on from the 10 Essential Umbraco Packages For SEO article last month, I thought I’d continue the series by taking a look at a what packages are available for added security. Whilst Umbraco’s role based security works great, sometimes you just need that fine-grained control over who can access what.

With that in mind, here are 5 Essential Umbraco Packages For Added Security (in no particular order)

1. Axendo Disabled Properties

This package allows you to disable properties on a document type based on the user type.

2. Attackmonkey Tab Hider

This package is an extension to the back-end that allows you to hide tabs on your content pages from certain user groups.

3. Attackmonkey Security Helper

This package is a simple package that improves the security of the users section by adding a regexp validator to the password field of the password editor that enforces a basic minimum password strength.

4. Disable Delete

This package prevents users from deleting folders you don’t want them to delete by blocking the delete action for any document type with a true/false property with the alias umbracoDisableDelete defined with its value set to true.

5. Protected Media

This package enables you to store docs on a secure location so only defined members (or member groups) are allowed to download after logging in.

There has been a fair bit of conversation lately around Umbraco packages not always getting the recognition that they deserve. Whether this is due to new developers not knowing what existing packages there are, or the flurry of new packages making them easy to miss, it’s often difficult to know what is actually out there. Warren Buckley is currently lobbying for a few changes in the projects section of our.umbraco.org to help make packages more visible, but I thought I’d try to help out by starting a series of posts to highlight some useful packages around specific subjects.

With that in mind, I thought I’d kick the series off with 10 essential Umbraco packages to help with SEO (in no particular order).

1. Google Analtics for Umbraco

This package adds a new section to the Umbraco backend, which gives you access to your google analytics statistics in form of some standard reports (out of the box). You also have the ability to create your own reports from the metrics and dimensions, which are available through the Google Analytics API.

2. 301 URL Tracker

The 301 URL Tracker keeps track of changes to the name or location of a page, and automatically stores the old URLs and when someone requests one of these old URLs, they are automatically transferred to the correct new URL, with a 301 HTTP response. Search engines recognize this HTTP response and replace the old location with the new location.

3. WWW Forcer

The WWW Forcer, will force the user to browse the site with the www. subdomain. This is especially useful for preventing duplicate page serving, an SEO technique.

4. Cogworks CogPageReview

The CogPageReview package gives content editors the ability to setup review dates on content then be notified either by a dashboard control or via regular emails a list of content due for review. Part of the rational behind this project is that regular updates to site content can help improve SEO site rankings.

5. Broken Link Checker

Broken link checker for Umbraco finds links in your pages as you publish them and checks that they are valid. If any broken links are found then this is reported via the Umbraco dashboard.

Links are queued for checking and a background scheduled tasks perform the actual verification. Once a user has fixed a broken link, they remove it from their dashboard.

6. Robots.txt Editor

The Robots.txt editor adds a tree node to the developer section, which allows access to your Robots.txt file from the root of your website. If you do not have an existing Robots.txt, then one will be created for you.

7. AutoTag

The AutoTag package is a custom datatype control that generates a list of keywords/tags from a text area. Thus making the task of categorising your new articles, blog posts or pages much quicker.

8. Canonical Meta Link Package

The Canonical Meta Link package automatically creates canonical meta tags, if the URL used is not the one found by Umbracos NiceUrl. Especially useful if you use umbracoUrlAlias or umbracoUseDirectoryUrls.

9. Google Sitemap for Umbraco

The Google Sitemap for Umbraco package automatically generate an XML Google sitemap to help Google index your site’s content.

10. Auto Link

The Auto Link package automatically injects links into content based on a configuration. This allows you to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your site.

Hopefully this post will give you a bit of an idea of what Umbraco packages are out there around SEO, and maybe even lists a few packages you didn’t know about. I definitely recommend for you to spend a little time going through the our.umbraco.org projects section, but if you can’t be bothered, be sure to keep an eye out for the next post in the series =).

UPDATE – July 20, 2010 19:27

Ok, I know the title of the post says 10 Essential Umbraco Packages for SEO, but when this one came up, I just had to add it.

11. DynamicRobots

DynamicRobots is a httpHandler which will look for the string {HTTP_HOST} in your robots.txt file and replaces it with the current sites hostname for you. This is especially handy if you are running multilingual, or multiinstall sites, as it allows you to define one robots.txt file that works for all sub-sites.