MovableType SEO
Alright I touched on Movabletype and SEO this last week
in my best movable type plugins article with the intent to come
back and provide some specific details. I will tell you that
Movabletype is optimized quite well out of the box, but there
are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some
dynamic content.
For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most
of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the
template within the tag. You can get fancy on your
index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two
templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site
wide.
The important part of your main index template is telling
Googlebot what the title of your blog and lead article are
properly. This is accomplished with heading tags. For the title
of your blog you can do this:
"><$MTBlogName$>
And for your lead article do this:
">
rel="bookmark"
title="<$MTEntryTitle$>"><$MTEntryTitle$>
This is pretty much essential as we know that all search engines
give weight to heading tags. You should do this as well in your
archive templates.
So let's focus on the individual archive template as this
is the page you want ranking well in the SERPS. From my testing
the code I use on two separate blogs (this one and
PlanetBangkok) the results show up very neat and tidy in Google,
Yahoo, and MSN. By this I mean the title and description fields
are what I am expecting them to be. Here is an example with
Google from last weeks: Article
Post Robot Review (hopefully I am still front page).
Ok back to you meta tags but this time go into your
individual archive template. Take a look at the following
from my own page:
ProfitPapers | <$MTEntryCategory$> : <$MTEntryTitle
remove_html="1"$>
">
Most of this is self explanatory. Notice the
<$MTEntryKeywords$> is being used to generate keywords
from your entry page (you may need to turn this field on in the
MT entry area). The meta description data is going to be the
first 30 words from your entry body as I have done with
<$MTEntryBody words="30"$> - so you should see some nice
descriptions in the search results pages. Finally I structure my
title to contain both the category and entry title - we all know
yahoo loves them </i> tags mmm'kay.
Now one final caveat with meta data is the issue/non-issue of
comment links. Personally I love comments, and I do not mind
people adding a link to my articles as long as their comment has
some meaningful input. Others disagree and feel that excessive
comment links leak pagerank like a sieve. I'm not too concerned
with this notion as the pagerank loss is minimal and Google has
done its best discounting links from popular weblog software. So
this is open to debate but for the record I do not bother.
If you want to stop Googlebot indexing your comment links you
can simply place a robots meta tag in your <i>comments
template</i> like so:
<i> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> </i>
Finally page names are important to all search engines and URL's
like <i>/archives/09/12/i_need_skillz_bec.html</i> are about as
useful as tits on a bull. I use the dashify plugin to structure
my page names for SEO. It's a 3 minute change - for details take
a look at my best movable type plugins article.
And that is pretty much it. Of course how well you do in the
actual search results pages depends on many factors outside the
scope of this article, but doing your meta data properly is
pretty much square one. Having said that it is also well known
that Google ignores most of your meta tags. I was snooping
through Matt Cutts page
source the other day and noticed he uses no meta info at all. In
fact you might notice that many large websites pay no attention
to meta tags ...Regardless these tags are still important for
Yahoo, MSN and the rest of the stragglers and Google seems to
always uses my descriptions properly for its results.
Although dated i still think Nicholas Carvine's article on
Movabletype SEO is one of the best online.
I hope someone finds this helpful. If I missed something cool
and useful let the comments fly.
</body>