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.