[pmwiki-users] Questions re pmWiki and how best achieve Search Engine Optimization for highest "Page Rank"?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Jul 21 16:26:30 CDT 2006


On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:23:13PM -0400, Henry Gurr wrote:
> 
>    pmWiki is a wonderfully good piece of software, for which I am eternally
>    grateful. 

Thanks!

>    So in the spirit of constructive inquiry I ask the following. (Answerers
>    to these questions might well be also added to www.pmWiki.com.)

Yes, it recently came up that we need to update the robots information
on pmwiki.org.

>    1) How much thought has gone into being sure pmWiki sites help maintain
>    highest possible "search engine page rank".

While PmWiki tries to be as search engine friendly as it can, we
don't necessarily strive to "highest possible".  For one, it's not
always clear what would do that.  In general I agree with Google's
position that useful, relevant content is the best mechanism for
maintaining page rank.

>    2) Of course webmasters should read many SEO pages and carefully to follow
>    the the rules so his own Wiki content will achieve a hi page rank. But are
>    there other parts of www.pmWiki that the webmaster should be careful to
>    supply specific content or choices?

Not that I can think of at the moment.  There are lots of pages
about SEO, but it's very hard to know which ones to trust.  So, PmWiki
strives to do what works naturally as opposed to anything specific.

Still, if there are particular rules or guidelines that PmWiki isn't
currently following, let us know and it shouldn't be too difficult
to improve.

>    Let me give an example of one item I wonder about: All of my pmWiki pages
>    seem to have the same "title line", irrespective of the topic of that
>    particular page. Here  is the "title line" I  find on all my pages:
>    <title>Research Info: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Main |
>    Home Page </title>

Actually, the <title> line won't be *exactly* the same for each page --
the group and pagename at the end of the title will change for each
different page.

But <title> is a perfect illustration of another point:  we don't
optimize only for search engines, but for other purposes as well.
The <title> tag is used by more than just search engines -- in
many browsers it's the text that appears in the window's title bar,
and more importantly it's the text that is used when someone bookmarks
a page.  Thus, PmWiki follows the W3C guidelines for what should 
appear in <title>:

    Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents 
    of a document. Since users often consult documents out of 
    context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, 
    instead of a title such as "Introduction", which doesn't 
    provide much contextual background, authors should supply 
    a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead.

So, PmWiki provides the site's title and group information, since
that is really all that is has.  Of course, page authors can supply
a better title using the (:title ... :) directive, in which case
PmWiki uses that instead of the pagename.

>    But one SEO author says: "Remember to use different, but relevant title
>    tag text on each page of your site - this is *very* important. Only use
>    keywords that appear on the page and avoid repeating the same word more
>    than twice. If you feel the need to repeat a word, put one instance near
>    the beginning and one towards the end."

Note that in the instance you cite, PmWiki is already doing the right
thing... it uses the page's name (arguably the most relevant keyword)
in the title, and any repetition in the title would generally come 
from the $WikiTitle.

>    Here is and other example" Although Metatag lists of Keywords, may no
>    longer be as important as they once were, should there be a special place
>    in pmWiki for a Metatag lists of Keywords? This would of course call for
>    special instruction as to how to do this.

This already exists -- just use the (:keywords ...:) directive to add
page keywords, which PmWiki uses in its own searches as well as filling
out <meta content='keywords' ... /> tags.  Similarly, the 
(:description ...:) directive can be used to create
<meta content='description' ... /> tags in the output.

But I think it all comes back to Google's #1 recommendation, which
is to regularly update the site with good quality content.  Doing
that will count for far more than any amount of page tweaking.

Pm




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list