SEO plugin needed

[Baerrus]

Folks, we really need a SEO plugin. I would be willing to send a donation to whoever gets to work on that. I am sure there is a dozen webmasters around here who could do the same. This work would benefits the whole community greatly.

plugin Functionality:

• Fine gained control of how Title element is constructed
• Intelligent construction of keywords meta tag
• Adding ALT tag to all images. Markdown does not support alt= at all.
• Google has recently announced they would also use rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements in the head section of your paginated archives.

[Xiph]

@Baerrus said:

• Adding ALT tag to all images. Markdown does not support alt= at all.

It does, actually: ![alt text](image link)

@Baerrus said:

• Intelligent construction of keywords meta tag

It doesn't really seem like Google and Yahoo have cared about the meta=keywords element for a while. Presumably Bing follows the same pattern, although if your forum is publishing news content you could try using the new news_keywords meta attribute.

@Baerrus said:

• Fine gained control of how Title element is constructed
• Google has recently announced they would also use rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements in the head section of your paginated archives.

There's your plugin! The latter of those could just be left to the theme though, but the iirc former would definitely need to be plugin-ized since themes don't allow for easy configuration from the front-end (yet?).

[julian]

For pagination, one could add "Prev" and "Next"... I thought we already did that, but I suppose not (I just disabled js):

[Baerrus]

@julian Thanks for the pointers. You reminded me about another thing in nodebb which trips up google. Lets say we have a topic mysite.org/topic/5/my-topic-name. Say it has 5 replies. To get a link at an individual reply looks like this:

mysite.org/topic/5/my-topic-name/3 <-- This is bad. Because for google it looks like a duplicate page of mysite.org/topic/5/my-topic-name. A more SEO friendly way and perhaps the correct way from HTML point of view is to use hash tags like mysite.org/topic/5/my-topic-name#3. All this hash tagging is completely transparent for servers.

[baris]

At some point we used hashtags but the hashtag isn't read by the server so we can't go to a post in the middle of a topic from a link like http://forum.com/topic/5/test-topic#200.

[Baerrus]

@baris Why not or you are referring to paginating a long topic? If so you could do /topic?page=5#300

[Baerrus]

@Xiph Thanks for pointing that out. Indeed looks like google disregards meta:keywords

Google and Metatags | How does it work | What can you do

Goolge actively supports metatags. This means they will look at your title and description tag to generate the snippet in their search results.

Metatags.org (www.metatags.org)

Here is my problem. My forum has been up for 2+ months now (

(optionsforum.net)

). But it still gets no search traffic. This is not my first site, so I know what to expect. I looked at google webmaster. It turns out google seems to have trouble understanding what is important. For example, Google thinks that word 'ago' is one of the most important keywords on my forum because every reply has a little date tag under it that reads like 'posted 2 days ago'. So I guess my question is do we have a nodebb based site with high page rank that gets a lot of organic search traffic?

[baris]

Right now if someone sends a link to a user who uses pagination http://forum.com/topic/5/test-topic/200 will do the correct thing because the server will read the 200 and go to the correct page, but with #200 that is not passed to the server side.

[Baerrus]

@baris Though elsewhere you guys use cgi params. Like ?page=3

[jonathanmh]

also: we need images that keep their filename

[Baerrus]

@jonathanmh I did not get that. Could you give us an example?

[Baerrus]

Not to harp on the topic. Just pointing out because it may have been misunderstood. - I wanted to pay money to someone for fixing all the SEO issues. I guess, if nobody wants my hard cold cash, I am going to have to do that myself. @julian @baris watch out for a new contributor.

[Bobber]

@Baerrus Where you at with SEO so far?