Titles and search part 1

From Extension Collaborative Wiki

This screencast is about making sure that the content you create for the web can be found. Increasingly that means being found by the major search engines, as we know that this is where the majority of people begin their search for new information. The bottom line is your content needs to appear on the first page of a search engine’s results, because we know that the vast majority of people never bother to even look at the second page.

Fortunately, one of the most important things for being found by the search engines is completely in your control as an author, that is the keywords you choose to use in your title, the first sentence and paragraph of your content, the descriptors that link to other articles, and the use of those words in your section headers. For now, we’ll be focused on creating strong titles, as that is the single most important item.

When constructing your titles we want to be sure to use keywords that people, your target audience would use, when trying to find your content. And we want to try to include as many of those strong keywords in that title as possible. And finally, keep in mind that 80% plus of the people will be coming to your content directly from a search engine, and so that piece of content needs to be able to stand alone. With that as background, let’s walk you through the first step of our next activity.

We’re going to have you go to Wikipedia and do some searches. We’re basically wanting you to study the titles of the articles, the keywords that they use, and the use of those keywords throughout the body of the article. You might ask why we are sending you to Wikipedia, and basically it’s because they seem to be doing this better than anyone. A search on virtually any topic at all will return a Wikipedia article on the first page of the results.

There are two ways of searching within MediaWiki and they both use the exact same text box. We will demonstrate this starting in the Collaborate wiki, as it works on the exact same software as Wikipedia. Then we’ll switch over to Wikipedia, and do a slightly more complex search there.

The search option in the Collaborate wiki is found in the top right hand corner of the page. To begin your search, you select the text box and enter your keywords, and then you would select the search button. For this search, we’ll keep it simple and just search on a single keyword, and we’ll search for the word MediaWiki. The search returns for us a list of articles matching the search term. As you can see the first article is one titled MediaWiki. If we scroll down the page you’ll see the homepage for this course as item number seven.

Let’s take a moment and show you the other type of search within Mediawiki, this is the use of the go button. This is used for when you already know the title of the article you are looking for. You can just enter the title of the article and go directly to it.

Now that you know how it works, let’s go over to Wikipedia and show you another slightly more complex search. This is the homepage for the English Wikipedia. Now you’ll notice that down here on the left column is that same text box with the go and search buttons. I’m going to enter my search terms, and this time I’m searching for hurricane prediction models. And as you can see, it returned for me as the third item in the search list a tropical cyclone prediction model, slightly different than the keywords I used but still what I was searching for. If you examine the article you’ll see that in the title, two of my three keywords appear in the title, and if you look down through the body of the article, you’ll see that the word hurricane appears five times, mostly used in the context of proper names, but it’s also used in more than one link, and links add to that search strength.

Now that you’ve been exposed to searching in both Collaborate and Wikipedia sites, using MediaWiki, let’s go over to a major search engine; we’ll use Google for this, and see how we might find that same piece of content.