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@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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