[OGDev] Fun SEO tricks wanted

[IvorW]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I think we should, where possible, raise trac tickets and enhance svn with changes, so everyone will benefit.

See my comments below

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openguides-dev-bounces at lists.openguides.org
> [mailto:openguides-dev-bounces at lists.openguides.org]On Behalf Of Tom
> Heath
> Sent: 09 January 2007 13:11
> To: OpenGuides software developers' list
> Subject: Re: [OGDev] Fun SEO tricks wanted
> 
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> Agreed that some URL writing amazon style would be worthwhile, ditto
> inward linking from other sites with high page-rank. Some other
> suggestions from me would be:
> 
> 1. Page order matters. In the standard templates the actual page
> content doesn't start until halfway through the source code. The rest
> of the stuff above that is just the standard navigation that appears
> on the right in many Guides, such as Recent Changes. This ordering
> should ideally be swapped in the templates, with page content first,
> following by any generic stuff. Obviously the actual positioning of
> the elements visually can be done with CSS. At the moment we have the
> worst of both worlds(*): content positioned on the left, but actually
> further down in the code than the stuff that's positioned on the
> right.
> * actually London has this sorted - credit where credits due ;)

Raised ticket #170: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/170

> 
> 2. Titles Attributes on Links. Especially for things like Categories
> and Locales. This should be a 1minute hack, and can't do any harm.
 
Raised ticket #171: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/171

> 3. Inter-guide Linking. Not even anything fancy like wiki-links across
> guides, but maybe even just links in footers to other guides nearby.
> We all have good pagerank, so lets use it.

This is ticket #76: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/76
> 
> 4. Working the Metatags even further. At the moment the contents of
> our (as in the OGMK) description tags is pretty sparse, and wholly
> dependent on the contents of the "Description of this node" field.
> Pumping the first 150 chars of the article content into the
> description metatag after whatever the "description of this node"
> field contains, would give search engines more to go on.

This is what the page summary is for, no?
 
> 5. More site-wide navigation. I like what OGL has done with the
> category-style navigation on the Node List pages. Something like this
> on every page would be great from a SEO and usability perspective.

This is probably guide specific. However, if someone could think of a generalised
way of doing it, we could ship a suitable navbar template.