[Wikimediaindia-l] Indic Wikimedia projects SEO

[Ravishankar]

Hi,

Some thoughts on SEO for Indic Wikimedia projects:

1. URL redirects / shortners won't help in SEO. First, search engines may
not index them. Second, they won't give much value for  them. So, any design
for URL shortening should keep in mind only the usability aspect.

2. Keywords Meta tag is dead officially.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

3. Three important text related factors in SEO: content in page, page title,
link anchor.

If you are going to compete for keywords in English or transliterated text,
you will end up modifying the Wikipedia page unnaturally which will annoy
the direct non-search engine reader. So it is best to optimize only for the
native language text.

Some practices in Tamil Wikimedia:

* We include the English name / spelling of the article at the beginning.
Earlier, this helped readers to search within the project. Now, the tendency
is to include the English title only for foreign names and not for
translations.

* One project that could be SEOed is Wiktionary. We changed the page title
of Tamil Wiktionary pages like this: <title>"{{Page title}} tamil word -
தமிழ் விக்சனரி ( Tamil Wiktionary ) - தமிழ் அகரமுதலி / அகராதி - Tamil
Dictionary</title>

So for the page Monkey it would be :

monkey - tamil word - தமிழ் விக்சனரி ( Tamil Wiktionary ) - தமிழ்
அகரமுதலி / அகராதி - Tamil Dictionary</title>


This has some of the natural keywords which people use while searching for
meaning in Tamil and has helped us rank Wiktionary pages well. Other Indic
language Wiktionaries can try this with variations of common keywords used
for meaning search both in English and Tamil.

One sure fire way:

Try getting more natural links from blogosphere for Wikipedia articles.

Plugins like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wikipedia-autolink/ can
help.

( I haven't tested the above yet )

Ravi
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