Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

I was searching the Internet on a topic related to Malaysia Airline flight MH370 one day and my own website mh370wiki.net was listed on the first page of the search results. I was looking for additional content but the search engine returned an article I had already published! That day was memorable because it is not often that my own website will be shown on page one. For most searches using MH370 as the search term alone or in combination with other key words the results start with various media articles and government pages, most of which are old but retain either authority or popularity. It is hard to break through to a higher search engine page ranking.

SEO Methods

The approach I have used with the mh370wiki.net website has developed over the years but can be summarised in the several steps below:-

Create content which is well written, structured, relevant and accurate.
Use the MediaWiki Extension WikiSEO. Create a meaningful page Title, page Description and a list of Keywords which are actually used on the page. I have recently been adding short phrases as well.
Create a Sitemap. This is placed in the /w directory.
Register the website with search engines. The mh370wiki.net website is registered with Google, Bing and Yandex. WikiSEO is configured to use the site verification keys.

Ongoing Efforts

Here are a few ideas:-

Quite a few pages in the mh370wiki.net do not yet have a section for WikiSEO. These pages are identified by sitemap generator I use. As there are thousands of pages it will take a while to fix that. As I add, or edit, the WikiSEO section I have also included a hidden category, for example Category:SEO 2025. In a few years' time I may want to review older SEO info and update it.
Getting found is a target but being found is a goal requiring ongoing effort. Recently I did a MH370-related search and one of the highest results was a website with almost no content. That is annoying so I did quite a few different searches and looked at the headers for each result page to see what the page title, description and keywords actually were. Why did those pages rank higher than others? Some had no keywords at all. Those pages probably had lots of backlinks, popularity and authority. The exercise, however, encouraged me to review and update the keywords etc listed using the extension WikiSEO.
Another exercise involved looking at the statistics for the mh370wiki.net (in cPanel) to see what terms people had searched for. If my website had content that matched the search terms but was not found, then those keywords could be added to the WikiSeo section on the relevant pages.
The website statistics also shows which pages were most popular. Adding links to and from those pages may also be useful.
As website content is added, and particularly if the site is restructured, the Sitemap will become outdated. New sitemaps should be uploaded regularly.
The Sitemap Generator I use, a commercial product did not capture all URLs. There is an option though to select the type of website. Reliability was improved by finding this and selecting a 'wiki website'. It is worth checking the sitemap before uploading it.
It typically takes a few hours to scan the mh370wiki.net website prior to creating a Sitemap. Bots from search engines are not going to spend that time, so having a sitemap for them is efficient and effective.
Website maintenance tasks are important too. This includes eliminating 'wanted pages' which are broken links, 'wanted categories' which have yet to be created, broken redirects and other items which can be found on Special Pages Maintenance reports.

Links

Extension:WikiSEO: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiSEO
Manual:Search engine optimization: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Search_engine_optimization

Search Engine Optimisation