SEO Optimization with MediaWiki
Why does Wikipedia often appear in the top 3 search results?
Because Wikipedia like many other wikis uses MediaWiki which is an ideal wiki software for SEO. Search engines give a lot of importance to the key phrases present in certain parts of the pages of your website such as:
- the url or web address of the page
- the tag
<Title> - the first title
<h1>
Indeed Google advises in its getting started guide for search engine optimization:
- specify page titles using the title tag and "Create unique tags
<Title>for each page" - use words in your urls
- Use header tags to highlight important parts of your text
but it is in these 3 places that MediaWiki automatically displays the content of the page name. Name that you can choose freely and that is unique (out of case).
MediaWiki automatically populates the tag <Title> with the name of the page followed by the wiki name separated by a dash.
The WikiSEO extension of MediaWiki allows you to manually edit the content of this tag for each page.
Google also advises to "Summarize the content of each page in the description tag". The WikiSEO extension also allows you to manually modify the content of this tag for each page. This optimization can be automated with Semantic MediaWiki.
Google advises to take care of the quality of the link titles. With MediaWiki the shortest way to create an internal link is to write the name of the target page in square brackets. So if the page has a name containing key phrases, the links pointing to them will also have those important key phrases. Categorized pages automatically link to their categories that include the category name.
Google also recommends formatting your links so that they are easy to spot. By default in MediaWiki the text is black and the links are blue and are underlined when the mouse is passed.
MediaWiki therefore makes it possible to design with great ease a site that will be very well referenced by search engines.
The natural referencing or free referencing aims to optimize your pages for search engines in order to display your website in the "first page" of search engines such as Google or Bing depending on the keyword or phrase typed by the user.
The services of natural referencing for public sites
They surround the design period of the site and include:
- submission to search engines and directories
- the choice of key expressions and definition of objectives
- the design of the pages according to the key expressions chosen
- or the audit of the website if it already exists and its modification according to the keywords selected
- the exclusion of certain uninteresting pages (general conditions, legal notices...) in the search results
- the analysis of the activity and the follow-up of the positioning of the different key expressions
It is therefore important to choose the key phrases before starting the design of a public website.
See also
