User blog:NoGround/Using Main Page best practices and SEO

Hello, it's been a while! I'm back with another blog post and a fun little thing I've been working on.

Best Practices
Fandom recently started a Wiki Best Practices blog series that is meant to help a wiki gain traffic and help increase community outreach and activity. There is a lot going on in these articles. Each and every link leads to a study of good web development practices, and it is a serious resource that should be used by every wiki admin on Fandom. There are currently only three articles on there, but the one I want to talk about today is FishTank's guide to Main Pages, which I have been making good use of. Before we dive into that article, though, we need to discuss Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

SEO and How it Effects a Wiki
SEO is an all-important statistic for businesses in the web-space. If you have good SEO, you have better visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo; in consequence, you gain more traffic to your website. Fandom itself is run off of mostly ad-revenue, so it's user-traffic is extremely important for the income of the company itself. But how does it effect this wiki, or if you're an admin of a different wiki reading this, your wiki?

To put it simply: good search engine optimization means that you will have more visitors to your wiki, and in consequence, more members reading, contributing, and engaging in the community of the wiki. These are what benefit us, as editors, admins, and users of Fandom. So, how do you increase Search Engine Optimization? There are a few factors outlined in FishTank's blog post linked above, and since the research is there, you should definitely check it out. To summarize:
 * Ledes (pronounced leads) are all-important
 * Images and other non-text formats do not get read easily for SEO
 * Hidden information, such as tabs, is a no-go

There are many other factors, of course, but these are some of the more important things to keep in mind when customizing the main page.

Updating Kumo Desu's Main Page, Once Again
During and after this blog, I will be working on the Main Page of the wiki, once again, to display more critical information using FishTank's guide. You can see that I have already implemented some of his practices, such as adding Homepage/Lede and Homepage/News above the slider. The universe tabber may stay, since it is a full-site navigation available for use on the main page, beyond the optimized Navigation Bar (which also used a Best Practices guide: The best possible local navigation bar). It is also a single-level tabber with clear labels, so I can justify keeping it there, for now. It may be removed in the near future.

The Gallery Slider is next on the chopping block, to be replaced by image-based context links. According to the eye-tracking data in the Main Page guide, the gallery slider gets an extremely low amount of attention (below 2%); basically only bringing in a bit of design flair and color to the main page. The new template will be a highly-customized, allowing for images and links to appropriate articles all within a single click of each image. The goal of this is to do two things: catch the reader's attention and bring them to high-traffic areas of the wiki.

I've been rambling, but these are the future plans for the. ~Ciao