August 07, 2002
Optimizing Movable Type (part 2) - More "Googlejuice"

After the much-read article on how I chose to optimize my archiving strategies in MT, I thought I'd document more tips, tweaks and tricks for website owners and Movable Type users in particular to enchance the user experience alongside with providing you the best "Googlejuice".

First of all: Accessibility. There's a long list of nice tips in the series of articles called "30 days to a moce accessible weblog" (by Mark). You definitely want to check it out. I'm not going to cover all those topics here, as our main focus for now will be users using the most common browsers plus increasing search engine availablity.

Some of the tips are already implemented in MT by default - doubleckeck your templates for these:

  • Meaningful page titles - an obvious help for people looking for your content as well as a Googlejuice booster. Works well with individual post archiving.
  • Use real links - especially interesting for people using YACCS or Enetation for comments... MT users are ok using the default setup (note that I break this "rule" for the referer trick described in the previous post)

Other MT modifications for better search engine indexing: You definitely definitely want to use real headers. Change from <font size...> to <H1>, <H2> etc... You can make the headers look exactly like you want using CSS style sheets anyway :-)

Niceties: you can add "Tooltips" to links and acronyms. The content of this should be searched by search engines.

Finally: The ultimate tip for getting hits from search engines: Make good content that people want to link to. It's as easy as that. Following all the the tips above plus optimizing your archive strategies are only going to get you to a certain point... If you're not writing interesting things, why should people bother visiting your pages anyway?

There are more tips available here:

Additions? Comments? Write me a comment. I may publish more of those articles later on. I'm also experimenting with the MT TrackBack. Experiences will follow... If you are an MT-user writing about this article, please "Trackback" :-)

Sponsored links
Related Entries
Comments

shit shot shit, get a life

Posted by: de on May 8, 2003 05:03 AM

If you're not writing interesting things, why should people bother visiting your pages anyway?

Sure,it makes lot of sense to have meaning full content.

Posted by: Internet Intelligence on September 1, 2003 09:00 AM

Thanks for the article, I also have installed Movable-Type in my weblog.

Posted by: Marius on November 4, 2003 09:09 AM

Hey, I noticed you suggested the javascript referrer code, which I got working as well. However, I notice the code strips the referral keywords from Google, Yahoo, etc. So I have no real idea what people searched on to reach my blog.

I noticed you modified yours since your referrals are displaying the keywords. I'm no Perl expert. Any chance you can post your modded referral code for downloading or email it to me?

Posted by: Tom Keating on April 23, 2005 04:58 AM
Post a comment
Name:


Email:
(Will not be displayed if you enter a website below. Otherwise, it will be displayed "spam protected")


Website:
(if you have one)


What do you want to say?
(please don't bother posting "spam" (pornography, viagra-sales etc - I will delete such comments anyway))


Remember info?



Referrers to this page
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.jacobsen.no/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/anders/MT/mt-tb.cgi/175
lowmagnet.org: Site updates and a tip o' the hat to andersja (September 7, 2002 01:48 AM)
"Site updates. Man is MSIE full of CSS bugs. A new logo, and some props to Anders Jacobsen."
d-log.net: Smart Archiving (October 5, 2002 02:31 PM)
"Anders Jacobsen has some handy hints for optimising MT archiving for maximum "googlejuice" (part 2 of the article). I might"
Markus blob blog: more google juice (November 6, 2002 07:41 AM)
"andersja's blog: Optimizing Movable Type (part 2) - More "Googlejuice""
WIRED: Googlejuice (January 22, 2003 06:30 AM)
"O Cavaleiro estava me perguntando hoje: mas como pode, seu blog já está no google e o meu, nada!. Andando"
Tim Swanson: Search Engine Basics for Blogs (April 8, 2003 07:34 AM)
"All of you are familiar with Google by now and most of you probably use it as your primary tool for researching. Back in college I migrated over to it entirely (history major) as I had little need to purchase..."
[ S K A I H I G H ]: Google Jui (May 8, 2003 12:34 AM)
"Thowing a couple of googleposts from Anders. My favorites are a mess and this is the easiest place to find"
Tech-Weblog by Christoph C. Cemper: Search Engine detection and proposal of related entries (July 23, 2003 11:30 AM)
"Usability enhancement with Search Engine Referrer keywords looking up intra-site archives on page-load."
Links: Optimising MT for Google (May 7, 2004 04:55 PM)
"http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/07/optimizing_movable_type_part_2_more_googlejuice.html..."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

© Anders Jacobsen
[extrospection.com photography]