Megami Tensei Wiki:Search Engine Optimization
This is a guide for helping to boost Megami Tensei Wiki's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) performance. Since we launched in late October of last year, we have slowly been increasing our footprint on Google results. Presently, our most popular pages on Google search are those directly related to our site name and characters from the Persona series that had increased traffic shortly after launch.
Still, there is an evident discrepancy between the footprint of this wiki in comparison to the Fandom wiki and other websites filling relevant search results. This is, in part, entirely unavoidable, as these sites have existed for far long than ours has. Still, there are certain practices that we can take as individual users to help boost performance; that goes for readers and editors.
Avoid Clicking Other Links on Google
It's an obvious thing, but also a habitual one that likely causes some stagnation. Even those aware of this wiki will likely default to searching on Google, and they are likely to click on a link to a different website when they do. This is a problem, but not one easy to solve as this wiki currently does not reach the top results in a number of search queries.
One way to mitigate this on desktop is to use Indie Wiki Buddy. This extension for Google Chrome and Firefox automatically redirects links to the Fandom wiki to our site. What's more for helping SEO, when searching on Google, this extension crosses out links to the Fandom wiki and provides a link to our site in place of it.
Just keep in mind: If there is already a link to our wiki in the results, it is still better to click that instead!
Cross-Linking From Other Sites
This is another matter where users may unintentionally be hurting the growth of this site's SEO without knowing. When a search engine crawls a website with a link to our site, usually via posts on Twitter and Reddit, that is—to varying degrees—seen as a relevance-boosting factor. The problem is that we cannot be certain that users are always linking to only our site. Users will still post links to the Fandom wiki, which will give that site relevance in search performance, inadvertently hurting ours in the process.
Nobody can be blamed for this; some people just don't know! Still, it is preferable that this is avoided. If it can be replaced by a link to our site where possible, that is always appreciated. Don't spam in the process, though; that can hurt us as well.
On-Site Optimization
While the site is currently fairly search engine-optimized in various ways, we have noticed that users sometimes don't understand how we go about implementing Meta tags into our templates, and this has caused certain pages to not have their images scraped properly.
The parameter seoimage= is used in infobox templates to tell search crawlers what image should be used to represent the page. This will default to whatever is placed in image=, or in the case of media templates, imagecover=. Users have been placing single images in <gallery> tags within the image= parameter. This is not a good practice, as the gallery tags are parsed in the file name used by seoimage=, which presents a broken file link to crawlers. Instead, if there is only one image used in an infobox, the <gallery> tags should be removed entirely, leaving just the file name. If there are multiple, use the <gallery> tags and set which image is to be used for SEO manually with seoimage=.