602615 - Improve organic search results for MDN (SEO)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, defect)

Description

[Austin King [:ozten]]

Doing SEO work on MDN will be an ongoing task over many bugs.

MDN is already doing some great things for SEO. This bug will capture changes for Q4 to improve MDN's position in public search engines.

We can evaluate which are feasible in the short term and punt others.

Recommendations:
1) Improve title tag content. Add tags and and development category.
Expected: <title>String a JavaScript Global Object for Web, Mobile, Application development - MDC</title>
Actual: <title>String - MDC</title>

This would draw on tags, full page name, and any other existing metadata to populate the title tag.

2) Add description metadata:
Expected: <meta name="description" content="String is a global object that may be used to construct String instances." />
Actual: none

The content is from the Summary field of a page.

3) Make sure sitemap is working properly and is used by crawlers
https://developer.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml
https://developer.mozilla.org/Special:Sitemap

Comment 1

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

Another idea that Asa and I came up with is to create new landing pages for major/popular topics with the new Django front end that will allow us to have better control over the content/layout and metadata, since the Deki doesn't seem to be very flexible.

While I want to tackle the low-hanging fruit for 0.9.1, we can work towards a more complete SEO strategy for 0.9.2.

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Tantek's suggestion for the rout Jay and I are discussing is to start with something like this:

/HTML5
/CSS3
/HTML5/canvas
/HTML5/audio
/HTML5/video

and build crisp landing pages that will link heavily into the wiki. 

We can extend to more of CSS3 for gradients, transforms, animations, etc. as time permits.

Comment 3

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Tantek's suggestion for the rout Jay and I are discussing is to start with
> something like this:
> 
> /HTML5
> /CSS3
> /HTML5/canvas
> /HTML5/audio
> /HTML5/video
> 
> and build crisp landing pages that will link heavily into the wiki. 
> 
> We can extend to more of CSS3 for gradients, transforms, animations, etc. as
> time permits.

For 0.9.2, we settled on 3 new pages:  HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. I'll file new bugs for those 3 pages and we can work through the design and implementation there.

Comment 4

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

I'm making this the tracking bug for our new MDN Learning section + the first set of Learn <foo> pages for HTML, CSS and JS.  Added bugs to dependency tree.

We'll start with getting some page designs from Chowse and then work in the copy Janet has put together.  I'll file new bugs for the content we'll need for the "Learning" landing page.

Comment 5

[Chris Howse [:chowse]]

For those not on the PM mailing list, here's the first iteration of Learn pages:

http://people.mozilla.com/~chowse/drop/mdn/learn/v1/

CSS and Javascript pages will follow the model of the Learn HTML pages.

Comment 6

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

How are we doing on these? Should we start attaching mockups/wireframes to the individual learn page bugs?

Comment 7

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

See the individual bugs