Hi folks, quick update on some little tweaks others may be interested in,

Following on from this earlier thread, I've just made some changes to our header.tt to populate the keywords meta tag with the categories and locales associated with a node. This was crschmidt's suggestion and seemed like a good one to me. You can see the results if you view source in pages such as: http://miltonkeynes.openguides.org/?Bombay_Cuisine%2C_Stony_Stratford

The changes were trivial, but should make a difference to search engine placement. I just substituted the unused fragment that references [% keywords %] for this:

[% IF (categories.size AND categories.size > 0) OR (locales.size AND locales.size > 0) %] <meta name="keywords" content="[% IF categories.size AND categories.size > 0 %][% FOREACH category = categories %][% category.name %][%- ", " %][% END %][% END %][% IF locales.size AND locales.size > 0 %][% FOREACH locale = locales %][% locale.name %][%- ", " UNLESS loop.last %][% END %][% END %], milton, keynes, open, guide" /> [% END %]

...although the code between <meta... and ...guide" /> should all be on one line (this was the only way I knew to make it all on one line in the HTML rendered for each node). I'll be monitoring traffic from search engines to see if this makes any appreciable difference. If anyone is interested in/able to add this to the main code base that would be great (ditto the DC.title mod below).

On a related note, http://geourl.org/ (mentioned briefly on this list in 2003) seems to be a pretty cool way to reuse/syndicate data from the OpenGuides, so I added a few pages manually from the OGMK. Have a look at [1] if you're curious how it looks.

If anyone else is interested in doing the same then OpenGuides is pretty much enabled for geourl out of the box, although it is worth changing the DC.title line in your header.tt to <meta name="DC.title" content="[% node_name %]" />

The only other gotcha to watch out for is not asking geourl to crawl nodes on your OG by providing a URL with URL-encoded characters. For some reason I don't really understand these get mangled along the way. Check out The Plough Inn entry at [1] for an example. One thing I'd like to do at some point is write a script to add new/updated entries from our guide to GeoURL once a week or so, so we don't have to add them manually. It seems Plazes must do something similar. Is this something worth running off everywhere.openguides.org? (aaahh, which shows how much spam we're getting :(

OK, this email is long enough already,

Cheers,

Tom.

[1] http://geourl.org/near/?p=http%3A%2F%2Fkmi.open.ac.uk%2Fpeople%2Ftom%2F&...

On 07/04/06, Earle Martin openguides@downlode.org wrote:

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:54:17AM +0100, Tom Heath wrote:

...

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.

God, it's like being back in 1997! You can't imagine how surprised I was, actually, when I discovered that my <title> trick had really worked - I've obviously been completely out of touch with the latest trends in searching.

...

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:

I think that's a great idea and have just implemented it in the distribution. http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/97

...

• 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.

No kidding? Well, I'll strip it out of the template if nobody objects.

...

• 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.

I'm going to reply to this when replying to Chris's comments.

-- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/

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