User:OVasileva (WMF)/SEO

Background
The number of users and visits to Wikipedia are directly related to our global impact, pool of potential editors, and fundraising. The majority of Wikipedia users and visits come to us through Google search results - determined by a constantly changing algorithm and presentation scheme. This brings more people to our projects - readers, editors, donors. Despite our current high rankings, we still have space in which to grow. Our high-quality results on English Wikipedia may not transfer to smaller projects. This creates an inequality of content access. We are also not investing in the most optimal ways to structure our content and potentially missing opportunities for improvement.

Research and implementation
Over the 2018-2019 fiscal year, we invested in the following:

Identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement:

 * Contracting GoFish digital to review and recommend improvements
 * Compiling and prioritizing SEO improvement recommendations
 * Researching the viability and effects of suggested improvements

Moving towards rigorous analysis:

 * Looking at current patterns in search engine optimization
 * Measuring effects of our changes through intervention analysis and A/B tests
 * Prioritizing for impact, starting with English Wikipedia before moving to other languages

Implementing changes to make sites easier to crawl:

 * Creating sitemaps to tell crawlers how pages relate to one another
 * Adding annotations that make our sites easier to understand by crawlers