How could Dragonfly help more for SEO

[Eestlane]

Hi,
Today one person I have made a website in past with Dragonfly complained about the position his site is in search engines.

So I found a fantastic radio show, where Estonia's main Search site administrator/programmer talks about neti.ee and google.com indexing methods.

So, the most important things seem to be:
sitemap(i.e google sitemap, however dragonfly should support automaticall updating of sitemap.xml file)
page titles(no urls like: ?id=243&sid=23)

Anything more important?
How could Dragonfly improve in this area?

[Phoenix]

For those who have no understanding of SEO, and for the record, this is not about SEO. That is an entirely different subject to getting your site indexed.

Why should DF have to provide sitemap updates? That is a matter between yourself and whatever add-ons you use, not core. Ultimately, you only need to submit a sitemap to help Google discover pages that Google crawlers might not otherwise find - DF does not impede crawler access to normally accessible pages. Your site permissions may, and a sitemap cannot bypass that issue anyway.

DF provides the basic ability to alter the key meta tags yourself. Beyond that, BrokenCrust already provides a very good enhancement to extend that. Whilst these tools are already available to you, just bear in mind that, in the context of real SEO, they play a very small, if any, role for major search engines.

If you really want to learn about genuine SEO, then search the internet - there are massive resources available there, as posted on this site numerous times. You can even have it done for you by "professionals".

On the other hand, if you just want a sound setup, then visit Google and checkout their advice on Webmaster Tools - their advice is sound and in line with the algorithm they use for assessing site quality, quality being one key area, others being content, relevance.

As also stated, many times over, DF does its bit by providing the basics in a responsive and essentially complaint structure that facilitates search engine visits. The rest is up to you, not DF - there is no substitute for DIY unless you have buckets of money to waste.

[dusman]

What about the coppermine core?, I have been suggesting for quite some time that at least that portion of the the core could use an overhaul to allow better SEO. One of the major SEO rules is that each page should have unique meta data and title, however each picture under an album does generate its own page however it keeps the album name info as its title and not the picture title. Yes, I know coppermine is a standalone that was ported over here to DF and yes the standalone coppermine fixed this issue quite some time ago, but I really believe people who run DF would like to have this as a feature, as it is now, Google marks those pages as duplicate content because of the identical titles on every page. thanks, I appreciate your thoughts in reply.

I would even be willing for just a sample work around, I have been trying to implement myself, but just lack the needed understanding of PHP and DF to get it done correctly.

thanks again

[Aforo]

We are working in a group in our Spanish Community in this area: www.webnaranja.com/foros.php?t=305

Biggest problem is duplicated metas and titles, but there are many more.

We do same improvings:
- titles can not start allways with your sitename. Is more relevant the title of the post or the title of article:
www.webnaranja.com/not...s.php?n=10

We have change the order of that (first title, after sitename)

We have make a diferente title for each post and theme:
www.webnaranja.com/for...?p=841#841
We get some keywords from the text.

Keywords (must be allways coherent) we have organizated in three levels:
- site keyword (common to all portal)
- module keywords (common to a particular module (for example forums, or news)
- content keywords (particular of a post, topic, article... and getted automatically from the article, post or topic)

We do the same for the meta "description". Three levels with the same distributtion and allways coherent with the content of the page.

Our biggest Dragonfly work and better results is:
www.google-earth.es

It's a forum with many post. Every post has it own title, keywords and description.

[hqarrse]

A couple of ideas:

proper search engine friendly URLs that include a chunk of the forum topic or thread name in the url, eg

dfsite.com/Forums/This-is-a-topic-title-etc/t=12.html

Forum topic titles in the description tags, eg

<description>dfsite - the blah blah - This is a topic title -etc</description>

Google Webmaster Tools comments that I have lots of duplicate page titles. Perhaps a way around this is to include a forum page number in the title

Move header menu to the end of the page code (not the page itself) as done by Eestlane in Redsign so that the key content is not after a vast array of links when crawled.

I think /images is disallowed by default in robots.txt? Google images is a good source of traffic so worth cutting that line?

Use of a script to generate keywords from topic content then write it in to a field in _bbtopics. It would need a blacklist for things like "thread","topic", "post". This can be used for a tag cloud and also for page keywords. If you really wanted to go for it, these tags could be included below thread names in the topic list pages.

I might have a go at a couple of these today. An interesting thread Eestlane and one worthy of more attention I think.