Manual:Search engine optimization

MediaWiki search engine optimization (or SEO) techniques attempt to affecting the visibility of a wiki or its pages in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. can be used for this purpose, as can search engine optimization extensions.

Types of SEO
Due to the types of work that can be done, we can distinguish three types of SEO. Each of them covers a different scope of work. the three types are:


 * On-Page SEO.
 * Off-Site SEO.
 * Technical SEO.

On-Page SEO
Includes works related to the content on the website. The idea is to optimize every page of your website with the right techniques. These can be, for example, keyword research, content creation or keyword optimization.

Off-Page SEO
This term covers all work that is performed outside the service. This concept is also known as link building. There are three types of links and techniques for building them:


 * Organic Links- Links generated naturally by website users
 * White hat SEO- Work on creating high-quality content using long-tail words, acquiring appropriate links. All actions imitate the natural actions of users as much as possible.
 * Black hat SEO- Activities aimed at obtaining as many links as possible, often of low quality. Currently, this technique may cause google penalties.

Technical SEO
The scope of activities covering all technical aspects of the website. This may be, for example, analysis and optimization of architecture or optimization of the page speed.

Robots
There are ways that external search engine robots, like ht://Dig, can be configured to allow efficient searching and spidering of MediaWiki-based systems.

Whole pages
Use the file to tell spiders what pages to index and not. Take a look at Wikipedia's own robots.txt.

You probably want spiders to not follow index.php dynamic pages, just the basic /wiki/article content pages. MediaWiki already outputs  in the HTML of "Edit this page" and "History" pages.

Specific sections of pages
You don't want search engines to index all the boilerplate on pages in the navigation sidebar and footer. Otherwise searching for "privacy" or "navigation" will return every single page.

The old way to do this was to put  around such HTML sections. This is invalid XHTML unless you declare a namespace it, but I don't know whether search engines still looking for nospider will handle e.g.. Google instead uses comments for the same purpose:.

A custom skin could output these tags around boilerplate. Googling English wikipedia for 'privacy' returns 2,920,000 pages! (See also 5707, which was declined.)