[OGDev] Re: [OGL] Google searches

[Tom Heath]

Thanks Earle, interesting reading. This gets me musing again about the
use of keyword and description metatags in OG pages...

My firm belief is that we should really optimise the OGs to use these
metatags. Until blogging largely killed it, PageRank had made <title>
and <meta.. content pretty irrelevant in determining search engine
rankings. However, in the last few years we've gone back to almost
Altavista-style reliance on these factors, combined with a less potent
dose of pagerank. As long as the content of the <title> and <meta tags
relates to that of the page body then the search engines do take
positive notice of them.

Talking about this to Chris Schmidt he suggested (though without being
convinced ;) using the "summary" field to populate the description
meta tag. I've just implemented this on the  OGMK, so we'll wait and
see what happens. Two other suggestions for Guide admins/developers:

- Kill the "Home" in the <title> tag on Guide home pages and just
leave the site_name there. Position of words in <title> tags really
matters, and "Home" just doesn't cut it.

- How about a "tags" field in the edit page, for some
folksonomic-style tagging of pages? This would serve to populate the
keywords meta tag, and hopefully be useful in other ways, though I
imagine it would entail some fairly detailed hacking of the OG
codebase.

Hope this is useful in some way?? Thoughts welcomed :)

Tom.

Just for the record our home_node.tt now looks like this.

<snip>
  <title>[% site_name %]</title>
  [% IF contact_email %]
    <link rev="made" href="mailto:[% contact_email %]">
  [% END %]
  [% IF summary %]
    <meta name="description" content="[% summary %]">
  [% END %]
</snip>

On 07/04/06, Earle Martin <openguides at downlode.org> wrote:
> Here's something that may amuse you. Four days ago I updated you on our
> Google ratings. Then, as an experiment, I added the phrase "the free London
> guide" to the <title> of every page. The results follow.
>
> Search terms       Rank then   Rank now
> ---------------------------------------------------
> london guide         46th        7th!!
> london city guide    26th       27th
> guide london         21st       24th
> london "city guide"  23rd       25th
> guide to london:      8th        9th
> "city guide" london   7th        4th
> "guide to london"     3rd        4th
>
> As you can see, we're now on the first page of results for both /london
> guide/ and /guide to london/ (this quoted *and* unquoted). Simply adding a
> string to our titles has given us a massive boost from nowhere to front-page
> for the most important search (london guide)! How cool is that? A salutary
> lesson to other guides, perhaps...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Earle.
>
>
> --
> Earle Martin
>             http://downlode.org/
> http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
>
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