User:Collei/Improving a wiki's SEO

__NOINDEX__ ''This page is a work in progress. Currently, most of this is a rough draft that will be fundamentally re-written soon. It is marked as "noindex" because it is not ready to be followed through with complete success yet, though you may find that some of the steps are helpful.''

1. Google usually analyzes how pages look on mobile, not on desktop. That's because there are more mobile users than desktop users.

2. Do not do things that will annoy your users, even if you think it boosts SEO. It's not clear exactly what Google uses to measure if people are annoyed with content (they claim it's just anonymized data, without specifying what data), but they seem to succeed so far. There's more to SEO than making good content, but none of this will work at all if your content is terrible.

3. According to Fandom, if Fandom wikis were to link to other sites and wikis within the Fandom network, instead of sites like Wikipedia, they could help stop signaling that sites like Wikipedia are the authority. On Miraheze, wikis could link to each other and to their own pages, instead of to sites like Wikipedia and Fandom, and therefore be able to decrease the perception of Wikipedia and Fandom being authoritative.

4. On Bing, the Fandom Fallout Wiki is placed above of Wikipedia's article about Fallout. The wiki representative on the Fallout Wiki, Tagaziel, has made some SEO changes to the wiki. You can find those in his contributions. These also include moving the Fallout Wiki's page about Expeditions to be titled something like "Fallout Expeditions" or "Fallout 76 Expeditions", which does sound like something people are more likely to search. Because of this, Miraheze's Genshin Impact Wiki decided to do the same thing: https://genshinimpact.miraheze.org/wiki/Genshin_Impact_Expeditions. Do not do this where it's obviously going to be repetitive/annoy users. This is also far from the only thing he did, but many of his other actions are still covered in other sections of this guide.

5. On Fandom, redlinks just appear as text, not as links, to logged out users. Before that, they had the nofollow attribute. Both of those improved SEO, probably because search engine spiders don't like a lot of 404 pages + they will only crawl a set amount of pages (usually around 100-200). They also added rel=nofollow to uncrawlable (? the meaning of this is unclear) links in their pre-UCP code, which is still publicly available on GitHub, but their post-UCP code is closed-source, so the current status cannot be confirmed. This has been implemented in Miraheze as an opt-in feature, with some limitations.

6. This form of wiki category organization (inspired by something that Fandom did once) appears to benefit SEO.

7. Having fewer unnecessary redirects is good for SEO. It's also better to not link via redirects.

8. According to Fandom, the specific tag you use for emphasis can have some slight SEO benefits, but it's not very important.

9. You should add content to any page that you think content would be good to put in. That also includes categories. Empty pages are bad for SEO.

10. Wikis that persistently publish terrible content may receive lower rankings even on their higher quality content. For this reason, do not leave up entirely blank or nonsensical articles. Either restore them to the last good version (if one exists), or delete and then re-write them (so that they don't get indexed while they're still terrible).

11. Think of what your page is about, then think of what keywords you would use to find this page if you were searching for it. Name the page using those keywords and include them on the article, but only where it feels natural. If there's nowhere that would make sense to put a keyword without introducing awkward wording, repetitive text, overly-complex sentences, etc., it's best to just not include it. Search engines are already able to identify common typos and alternative spellings.

12. Pages that take too long to load are penalized in search results. For this reason, you should reduce junk code, remove extensions that you never will use, etc. You can also minify your images using https://tinypng.com, and in terms of actual visible size (i.e., width x height), don't make them larger than needed. Using the  file format is also a good idea for performance, though when people are downloading your files, they might not like that. The  format used to not be supported by MultimediaViewer, but it is now works after the recent 1.39 MediaWiki upgrade.

13. Use an alt tag to accurately describe images, and give them a relevant file name. Example (alt tags to be added): https://genshinimpact.miraheze.org/wiki/Nahida Also read: https://ahrefs.com/blog/alt-text/, https://ahrefs.com/blog/image-seo/ (mentioned in the ref tag as a citation but a good resource too)