History: Search engine optimization

Source of version: 23 (current)

! Search engine optimization (SEO)

__Background information__: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization|Search Engine Optimization] (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. Read more at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization].

!! Tiki functions
Encouraging search engines to fully index your site is somewhat of an 'art' rather than a 'science' since the processes used by the search engines are not usually published and they can change from time to time, typically to stop web site owners from 'gaming' the system to get an unfair index position.

The bottom line is that the only certain way to get a good index position is to have a site with extensive content that is interesting enough for other websites to cross reference it. 

However, Tiki does provide a growing list of tools that automate or make easier the management of key aspects of a site that 'help' the indexing processes, as follows:

!!! Meta Tags
*   The Meta Tags admin pagae is the first place to start where:
** Universal keywords (i.e., those applied to every page) can be entered or, more usefully,
** Tags (freetags) applied to individual pages can also be applied as keyword meta tags to the page
** A universal description meta tag can be defined - but Google, for example, will flag the multiple use of the same description as bad practice, so it is recommended that you also use
** The option to use the wiki page description as the description meta tag -- which obviously takes some effort but is better than applying a default to every page.
** Where possible, Tiki offers the possibility to use Multi-lingual Meta Tags that enhance the quality of the results per available language of the Tiki.
*   Automated description meta tags are applied to:
** Blogs using the blog name text
** Blog posts using a concatenation of the post title and the blog name
*   Automating the alt tag for images (increasingly important for indexing images) when using the IMG plugin
** If a specific alt tag is set in the IMG plugin this is used as the first preference, but if not set
** If some specific text is provided as a caption using the 'desc' parameter in the IMG plugin, then this is used as the alt tag as a second preference, but if not set
** The description field applied when the image was loaded into a File Gallery is used, or if this is not set then
** The alt tag defaults to "Image" 
* ((Canonical link element)) (activated by default)

!!! Site maps
See ((SiteMap))

!! Tips
* Turn error messages off to anonymous (as useless text is indexed)

!! Related pages
For search engine friendly URLs, see: ((Apache Clean URLs))
Also related: ((Meta Elements)) ((Canonical link element))

! Alias
* (alias(SEO))
* (alias(Search Engine Friendly))
* (alias(SEFURL))
* (alias(SEFURLs))