On Sun May 9 13:27:45 UTC 2010 Garland Binns wrote:
As of Friday last week, the Standard Operating Procedure has been prepared for the Keyword Optimization Project, FYI. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Keyword_optimization
Please let me know if you all have any questions!
Hi Garland,
Thanks for posting this to the open mailing list.
A couple of suggestions.
Firstly the importance of <title></title> and <meta name="description" content="short summary with key phrase"> tags. Search engines present the title as the link on the search results to the found page. Often key terms searched for will be highlighted in the title. Also the main search engines (Google, Yahoo) will use the meta description for the short description below the link.
To help simplify SEO for authors I think you should emphasise title, h1 and h2 tags, along with meta description as the primary places to enter key phrases. Anything else is likely to be much less important in any page rankings.
So for example https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB might be best served with: <title>Boot and Run Fedora from Live USB Media - Fedoraproject</title> <h1>Fedora</h1> <h2>Boot and Run Fedora from Live USB Media</h2> then optionally have <meta name="description" content="Step by step guide on how to boot and run Fedora from USB Media">
A clear example in your document may help authors understand more quickly how to approach this.
For a nice history on how all the other meta stuff is ignored see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element
Secondly as a source of keywords using the wiki search may be more productive of a broader range of keywords.
The awstats page shows the word fedora as very much the most common keyword, with supplemental words such as usb, schedule, screenshots, release, selinux coming much further down. There seems to be no results for more general terms such as 'linux distribution' or more specific queries such as 'fedora video driver bug'.
I had proposed adding the wiki search box to the Fedora front page: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/websites/2010-April/007831.html Hopefully this would give a source of more detailed keywords that users and contributors were looking to have answers to and allow for greater optimisation of the websites.
I personally like some of the arguments put forward by Jakob Nielsen for having search on the front page: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010513.html
This was part of a wider proposal I had made for redesigning the information architecture of the front page: http://astavale.co.uk/fedora_homepage/notes.html Which focused on three types of website user who would move from New to Returner to Contributor as a way of organising the information. Please take a look if you have the time.
Hope some of this is useful to you,
Al Fedora User