Posted by greggles on June 24, 2010 at 2:40pm
Hi SEO Group,
There's an issue for updating the titles/keywords here on groups.drupal.org to be a bit more searcher friendly. I started digging into it and realized it would be best to get more advice from the experts on this one.
So, if you are looking for fame and glory as one of the people who helped improve the SEO for groups.drupal.org (i.e. credit in blog post and/or tweets) lay down your research and ideas for how we can make this site easier for people to find.
In particular, I'm looking for:
- Updates to the mission text that shows on the home page
- Ideas for better title text (perhaps we should add in and use the page_title module)
- Primary navigation tweaks
Thanks!
Comments
Page title
I had issues with the Page Title module conflicting with Page Manager / CTools and had to disable it. It's been a while and maybe that's fixed and maybe it wouldn't be an issue with OG Panels but I thought I'd mention it just in case.
Michelle
explanation?
Seriously? I came back to see what's going on and see that not only are there relatively few ideas but somebody even voted down on this conversation?
Perhaps the person who voted down wants to explain why they voted that way?
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
what is this "optimize" you speak of?
What a HUGE project. As I'm sure you know it's hard to optimize a site for everything. Some groups do exceptionally well in their search engine rankings. Most sort of suck. It'd be up to the individual groups to "fix" their keywords.
A few (basic) ideas to make the site more accessible to search engines:
<title>[node-title], [group-name]<title>
(see above re. Canonical URLs).<h1>
tag from the list of allowed tags in all Input Formats.Revised mission text suggestion:
I hope that list of suggestions is a useful jumping off point for other ideas as well. :)
Which groups are performing poorly?
I looked at http://drupal.org/node/797932 and "Seattle Drupal Meetup" ranks within the top 5 (actually #3 if you don't count the indented results). I don't know if there was a ranking increase due to recent changes.
I'm seeing lots of duplicate titles. Paginated results all have the same title for each page, for example. This is neither good for users nor for search engines.
The page title for the URL @ http://groups.drupal.org/groups?page=1 should say "Working and regional Groups & Meetups - Page 2 | groups.drupal.org"
Re: emmajane
She brings up some great ideas. I'll comment on a few of them.
This may help some (particularly for link anchor text when people link to the group using its URL as the anchor text), but not worth it if it's too hard to do.
I think this is backwards =P. g.d.o's frontpage title should identify itself as groups.drupal.org at the very beginning.
I agree with this, except for taking out the member count. Reason:
There are a lot of links @ http://groups.drupal.org/groups
In order place more weight on the groups any links that aren't necessary for the user should be removed.
Is this really needed? The user can get that information on the group page.
How do I know I want to join before I've even looked at the group?
Users may find this important, plus it adds uniqueness to the page, I wouldn't remove this.
If this isn't doable an alternative (infact this is preferrable) would be to link to an HTML (not XML) sitemap (at the footer of the page) which provides a categorized listing of groups (without any pagination). Examples of HTML sitemaps: http://www.google.com/sitemap.html http://pages.ebay.com/sitemap.html
Having an XML sitemap is fine too, but not necessary.
Anyway, I think the primary issues are:
"Seattle | groups.drupal.org" doesn't tell me at all what this group is about except that it has something to do with Seattle. Titles should include a short summary about the page. They should follow a similar pattern: Group name | group.drupal.org | short summary here
Keyword order for page titles
re. the front page title: In page titles (and anything else you want to optimize) the most important words come first. I don't see any reason why we'd want to optimize for the keyword "groups.drupal.org" which is why I recommend putting the description first and the site name second.
homepage thoughts
In general I like putting the sitename first on the homepage for the reasons cited earlier.
For g.d.o I think that it's not so important because it's just the domain name and not really the "site name".
Maybe a compromise is to change it from "groups.drupal.org | " to "Drupal Groups | " since that is
I'd also be up for something broader "Drupal Community | ..." but that may be overstepping the bounds of what this site "really" is.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
What are people searching for?
Adding "Drupal" definitely helps. Do people really search for the term "groups" though? Maybe "Drupal User Groups"? Yes there's more than just DUGs groups on the site, but if you're trying to focus on SEO you need to think like a search engine. :)
i hate typing a subject for a reply
'user(s)' could just go in the mission statement too.
If I was searching for the Seattle Drupal Group I'd naturally search for 'seattle drupal group' or 'seattle drupal users group'. Both come up as #1 on Google because 'users' is mentioned in the mission statement and 'group' also matches 'groups'.
And yes, people are searching for 'seattle drupal users group'
re
groups.drupal.org matches both 'groups' and 'drupal' keywords even tho it may seem like it doesn't, however changing that to 'Drupal Groups' is a better and more exact match, may make more sense to users, and probably be a bit more helpful to rankings.
Group titles should target the group's name, 'Drupal Groups', and a short summary of the group's primary focus (if provided) will naturally target other keywords. But you'd want the group name and 'Drupal Groups' to come at the beginning so the user can easily see that it is in fact a g.d.o page instead of some other page on yahoo, or meetup.com (it's a branding thing). Plus, the most important keywords of a group is the group's name, as well as 'Drupal Groups'.
I can help to make a better
I can help to make a better seo, just need some keywords that you want to be top rank, for better optimization, i need some keyword list to begin a study.