Wikipedia’s SEO Lessons
From an article I was browsing today, there is something really important about SEO that we may have overlooked and seen as something unimportant.
Wikipedia is a site which allows users to put information for free. One can put an article for various topics which could range from glasses to the atmosphere to your local celebrity. To boost their page rank, Wikipedia’s design is really simple: do on-page SEO.
Everything about the site’s pages is friendly to search engines. You would find title tags, meta descriptions, and file names for each page of the site. The site also has plenty of quality content which helps boost their rank. The article also disclosed that when articles mention another topic available on the site, that topic is automatically linked to the page that discusses such. Readers find the site really informative so much so that when they discuss definitions or samples lifted from the site, they link back to Wikipedia.
This can be pretty difficult to do but it really helps. Just look at how Wikipedia did it.
Hi Noel,
The on-page SEO may be great at Wikipedia, and the content attracts the engines, of course, but I believe it’s at least as much to do with the inbound links.
Website editors, bloggers and commenters who mention something to do with a topic they feel may need defining will add a link to Wikipedia almost without thinking. Writers thinking their opinions need support will quote Wikipedia if they can find an article that agrees with them. And even a quote from Wikipedia gets a link back to the source page. These are all deep links.
Often these references will be a context where ‘nofollows’ are not used, and the link love gets piled 10 feet high for the topic concerned.
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
This was a good find and I think it addresses a larger point as well.
If you can create a website that offers up valuable content, people see it as a solid resource and link to it. Then optimizing in such a way as Wikipedia you can take full advantage of the popularity.
My thought is that many SEO’s go about creating content in reverse. Creating the content with SEO’s in mind from the start. Instead, look at Wikipedia, they create great content within a frame or structure that allows and encourages SE readability naturally.