Basic SEO for Vanilla 2!

phreak

Hi all,

Vanilla 2 doesn't write Meta-Keywords nor a Meta-Description in the source. Missing too is that there are no link titles created, no RSS is possible and no sitemap.xml can be created.

- Meta-Keywords
- Meta-Description
- Overall RSS (?)
- {a} needs titles (taken from the threads name, maybe?)
- Sitemap.xml creation
- proper robots.txt

Shouldn't this be on board?

Greetz
p*

Todd

We've done a lot of research into SEO and have done quite a bit of work. We do have rss of the discussion lists and @Tim has done work on a sitemap.

From what we've read the keywords and description aren't really used by search engines anymore, but maybe you have a different experience?

The robots.txt is something you've mentioned before and I think it's a good idea. The whole team is in the office tomorrow and I'll bring it up.

phreak

Hi Todd,

Thanx for your polite answer. Nice to hear that there is some stuff in the making.

Regarding the META keywords and description. From what i've read is that the keywords do have less impact, then they used to, but they are probably still a factor of maybe 2-4% and shouldn't be left out. From a logical point of view, i would say search engines don't react necessarily on what the keywords say, i think they compare them with what they filtered from the content of page.

The META description is not optional i think. If i'm searching my forum with its name ("babyforum.at"), Google describes my website like that:

- - - -
All discussions - Babyforum.at
babyforum.at Thread 1. Announcment 15 Comments Last post from ... and some other information that is on the content side of my page. ...
www.babyforum.at/
- - - -

This is no proper information for the my root page, if visitors are interested it's not really inviting. The same happens for other pages (that have a discussion topic interesting for a possible visitor) that are in the search results where the description is filled with my footer information and random stuff the search engine tries to grab from the page.

A meaningless description in the search results may lead to lost visitor! My idea would be a description for the main page that is possible to be filled in the Vanilla dashboard and an option to display this description on all pages forumwide OR take the first X(n) letters from the first post in a thread to display as description.

Have fun on the team!
Stefan

phreak

Hi Todd,

Can you give us an update of what we can expect?

By the way, the most indexed word by Google Webmasters on my forum is "Permalink". ;-( Would be better if this would reflect more the topic of the specific forums.

phreak

Any news on this?

My search engine description is still not very attractive for a click trough.

Linc

@phreak It's pretty trivial to add meta tags to a page with a plugin:

$Sender->Head->AddTag('meta', array('name'=>'keywords', 'content' => 'my keyword list goes here'));
You could do that in a Base_Render_Before(&$Sender) function to apply the meta tag site-wide, or call it in a specific controller (e.g. DiscussionController_Render_Before) to do a page-by-page basis.