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.
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/
-- OpenGuides-Dev mailing list - OpenGuides-Dev@openguides.org http://openguides.org/mm/listinfo/openguides-dev
On Friday 07 April 2006 11:54, Tom Heath wrote:
- 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.
There have been mutterings in the past about replacing Categories and Locales with generic tags. I for one think that it would be a good idea.
Dave
On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 12:05:01PM +0100, Dave Page wrote:
On Friday 07 April 2006 11:54, Tom Heath wrote:
There have been mutterings in the past about replacing Categories and Locales with generic tags. I for one think that it would be a good idea.
I responded to this on IRC a while back, but I'll put it here for historical purposes:
Tags and categories are two entirely different methods of describing something. Tags are designed to be a personal representation of the content that something contains -- 'fun', 'cheap', 't-accessible' -- not a more general description of the content in question consumable by the general public.
Categories and Locales are designed to be a more controlled selection of data. They are roughly based on a pre-determined categorization method -- to the extent that I take special care to keep category and locale lists trimmed, since they are then used for selection by other users.
I am totally against replacing categories with tags. The use of tags and use of categories do not match up. I do not have a problem with adding tags in addition to categories.
In general, I think the 'folksonomic revolution!11one' is crap. I think that tagging is a poor solution to categorization. I think that it works well in limited circumstances -- typically when you have an extremely large userbase dedicated to tagging. I think that it's confusing to non-technical users. I think that it only works even remotely well when you can have tag suggestions for a 'thing' made automatically, because otherwise people don't know what kind of other tags are in use. I think that the idea of finding 'related' tags is difficult, especially when you have limited tags to choose from.
But I understand the popularity, and in some cases, the apparent improvement that such an oppourtunity would offer. But it's by no means a silver bullet of categorization, and replacing categories with such a thing would not be a good idea, in my opinion.
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.
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
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Christopher Schmidt -
Dave Page -
Earle Martin -
Tom Heath