The Funtoo Linux project has transitioned to "Hobby Mode" and this wiki is now read-only.
SEO
Seo stands for search engine optimization. This page is dedicated to helping improve your page rank on search engines.
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
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
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
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.
External Links
Posting links around 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.
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.
testing, and evaluating
free analysis
- http://www.webrankpage.com/
- http://www.seomastering.com/ (shows estimated page value in USD)
- http://seositecheckup.com/ (throttled to 1 check every 30 minutes)
- http://www.site-seo-analysis.com/
- http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
free with required registration
- http://www.site-analyzer.com/
- http://www.wpromote.com/seo/seo-audit-tool (shows which pages are ranked)
pay with free trial
free 1 site per week testing