Intro to SEO

Hello, Wikians!

My name is Angelina, and I recently joined Wikia to help out on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. That sounds impressive, I’m sure, but what does that mean?

SEO is a multi-discipline field that aims to bring greater visibility and traffic to each of our communities through prime placement on search engine results pages. Our team monitors traffic and rankings, devises tests and impact projects, and makes recommendations across a wide range of topics—from the words linked on each page to the names of our image files to mobile-friendliness of pages.

Some days are spent helping the Product and Engineering teams on new or improved features, and others are spent updating help pages or creating documentation for the Community Team.

This is not the first discussion about SEO here, and it won’t be the last! Search engines are constantly evolving, so it is important to regularly review our content, templates, and links to ensure we are keeping up with the times. One thing you can do today to make an impact is to audit your community’s main page.

The optimal main page should include unique, descriptive text that explains the community and links to important article and category pages in a natural manner. Reread the page and imagine a visitor who is learning about this topic for the first time. Where are the places he or she would want to click to learn more? That is where you should add a link.

To read more about how search engines build their indexes and the elements that are essential to a highly ranked page, check out our SEO help page.

In upcoming blog posts, we will dive deeper into some of the things each community should review (and possibly update) to give it the best possible chance of earning that coveted first-position spot in the rankings. I love talking about this topic, so feel free to leave questions and ideas for future posts in the comments or on my message wall.