My site, fortunately, doesn't need to worry a lot about search engines as the traffic is primarily a group of people who've been together a long, long time (since the late nineties as an online community). However, i still track such things.
Google's 'search console' has had the site ranked as high as #8 before. During the 'season' this usually drops due to some pretty heavy hitters firing back up, but it usually climbs back in after the season... this year, however, i'm dropping like a stone. I've gone from low to mid 20's to 51 in about a month and a half.
I grasp that the metrics change, but...
at any rate, I've gone through the pages in the last few days tagging items of value with things that better describe what the site is about- for instance:
- index.template: the title tag using SMF out of the box is good, but it lacks a good description meta according to metrics used- so... i hard coded it. Also introduced an H1 with verbiage akin to the title tag and meta:description, immediately followed by both an h2 and an h3 both expounding on the h1, and then titles of the boards are now H2's. The 'last post' of each h2 is now h3. .... i have some validation to do, but it's pretty close right now.
- boardindex: the cascade from^ and the message title's are h3's
message.index: the cascade from index.template, and at first i made the title's an additional h1 and the message itself h2's, but decided to NOT do this at all and removed them.
today my intent is to delve into ETags and see if i can manage cache's and headers better.
it will take some time to see if my little adjustments will make any impact whatsoever, i'll report back if they do.
What are some tricks any of you guy's know of that makes a page's content (specifically SMF driven sites) report more relevant information to the search engines? If you have some I'd surely appreciate the sharing, along with 'how to'.
