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The Funtoo Linux project has transitioned to "Hobby Mode" and this wiki is now read-only.

SEO

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Seo stands for search engine optimization. This page is dedicated to helping improve your page rank on search engines.

Content

Having content that is relevant, accurate, and worth sharing is the number 1 way to increase search result ranking. Past this accessibility is the next major factor for SEO. If you have great content, but can't view it from a phone, or tablet, you're going to take a major rank hit. If your website has great accessibility but extremely poor content, you're going to take a major rank hit. Make sure to produce a website with both good content, that is mobile phone friendly, and quickly served up. :-)

Content Order

Serach engines pay most attention to content at the top of your html. H1 page title & body are the first 2 things that should be in your body tags. Then sidebar, and or navigation links, followed by the footer. On your css you will manipulate the sidebar, and or navigation into place. This is called content first web design, and mediawiki's vector skin follows this design approach.

Domains

When selecting a domain name, try to choose a short domain name, omitting words like "the" the longer the url, the harder it is to remember, and this affects page rank.

http://www.yes.com is excellent http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com is bad....

Domain registration duration impacts SEO, if you intend to have the site a long time, register several years rather than a short period of time, as this will improve SEO.

Canonical Urls

Your sites URLs should have 1 or the other url re-writing, and 301 permanent redirecting so search engines do not see duplicate content. You are not penalized for url length by adding a www. subdomain. 

root # curl -I http://funtoo.org/Welcome
root # curl -I http://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

URL rewrites offer content at the original source also. Example:

http://www.funtoo.org/index.php?title=Welcome

serves the same content as

http://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

we would want the cannonical url to tell search engines that http://www.funtoo.org/Welcome is the canonical url, the url to use index etc, and all duplicates are ignored instead of penalized.

php?

Question marks are bad. Most search engines freak out about indexing anything past a ? so use url rewrites to remove index.php? and leave just site.com/Main_Page

www

domain.org should have url rewrites, and be rewritten to www.domain.org for the purpose of wildcard ssl certificates, and cookie free domains.

301

Some users when referring to your web site will post links as domain.org, or www.domain.org. using a 301 redirect on one or the other will have search engines treat both as one singular domain. Dns 301 redirect domain.org to www.domain.org

Url spaces

You should prefer - over _ to represent spaces. MediaWiki is flawed in design preferring _ over -. This is an older SEO problem, yet it still persists in affecting your page ranking. web-server-stack is an example of an SEO friendly url with spaces.

Server Speed

How fast your page loads significantly impacts seo. Installing a caching reverse proxy, and testing that it hits close to 100% of the time is a good idea. It prevents your server from rebuilding pages, hitting the processor, and also speeds up page delivery to move the bottle neck from the php building to the internet connection speed. see: www-servers/varnish & Web-server-stack#Benchmarking

Cookie Free Domains

Cookies force static content to be reloaded. Static content can be hosted on an alternate subdomain in most cases. example: static.google.com

CDN

Use of a CDN for static content will speed things up, and distribute load to client's geographically local nodes. since a cdn is external to the website you don't have to worry about cookies forcing a cache to reload the content.

Mobile Friendly Content

Mobile devices have limited ram and processor speeds. using limited image sizes, and having css omit unnecessary content is a good idea.

Mobile Friendly CSS

Using bootstrap, foundation, or equivalent responsive css will make your website render on mobile devices correctly.

CSS & JS Minification

Minified CSS & JavaScript is simply your file with all unnecessary spaces, and carriage returns removed.

CSS & JS Positioning

CSS insertion needs to happen at the top of your web pages source. JavaScript needs to be loaded last, so that goes at the bottom of your web pages source.

Avoiding Inline Styles

CSS has several forms but inline styles should be avoided. Prefer an external CSS file, preferably distributed by a cdn.

Meta Description/Keywords/Tags

Meta information is parsed directly by search engines. with these in place they will be displayed rather than the initial text of your canonical landing page.

Dublin core

Dublin core is a metadata system that produces details for search engines to discover such as authors, & publication dates. many sites generate this meta information dynamically.

Links

postling links to your site on other sites

Posting links around about your site is ok so long as it is organic, and not spammy. addthis share widgets improve SEO as they produce many backlinks that are not a bot dumping anywhere, and everywhere. addthis produces twitter/facebook/g+/redit etc share links, and has an analytic service.

Linking to high quality trusted sites helps, high quality trusted sites linking back helps. Linking to low quality untrusted sites hurts, low quality untrusted sites linking back hurts.

External Links

When posting links on your site to other sites, make sure you use target="_blank" so the user doesn't disconnect from your site. it will open a new tab or window on their browser however they have it configured. This will reduce your bounce rate.

SiteMaps & robots.txt

Sitemaps generate xml pages that tell crawlers about your sites content pages, and robots.txt tell crawlers about pages they're not allowed to index. In a few iterations ill look up how to make a robots that allows everything, as if its not even there, and an external site map generating service.

Analytics

Analytics tell you information about your websites users. Some analytics services enhance seo, others are just informative. http://www.google.com/analytics/ https://www.quantcast.com

piwik is server side analytics.

Webmaster Tools

Sign up for webmastering services provided by search engines. Bing and Yahoo are bundled together now.

Establishing Trust

Encourage users to tell the internet your website is trusted.

testing, and evaluating

free analysis

free with required registration

pay with free trial

free 1 site per week testing

unsorted goodies

Malware & Bad Link Scanning Services

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