Starting a new thread for SEO

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 23:31, Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal@gmail.com> wrote:
Srikanth mentioned a valid issue related to search engine optimization
with Indian wikis. I dont get any result for this query:
"Malayalam + Mango "  to take me to Mango article in Malayalam wiki.
Because there is no way a search engine can index the word Mango in
english to the Malayalam wiki page of Mango. Having Mango in URL does
not help search engines.
I know some SEO tricks used by Malayalam news portals to address this.
They use Meta tag efficiently and put english and malayalam keywords
associated with the article. For eg: a news article about
Mullapperiyar Dam will contain a meta tag with keywords
"മുല്ലപ്പെരിയാര്‍ ഡാം, mullapperiyar dam, "
Some of the news portals even integrated this trick their news
publishing workflow with custom plugins to CMS systems(like Drupal).

If we want to get people searching in English to our wiki articles, we
can think about a Meta tag solution - some extension that injects
keywords to meta tag.

Don't we need to point show ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochi if one search
for Kochi? atleast within first 10 results?

 Completely agree with you Santhosh. SEO is as important as outreach (its online outreach after all). Ravi,Sundar,myself were discussing this on a dinner after a meetup. But manually adding Meta tags is an additional overhead on content creators IMHO. If there is some automatic tagging with interwiki english page category etc(Bot idea ?), its worth a try. 

Ravi, can you please add more since you are an expert :) 


Regards
Srikanth.L
http://srik.me