Guide: Search Engine Optimization

This guide will teach you how to optimize your pages to make them more popular, it's the first in a series of guides Maj will be putting out aiming to support the Minecraft Fanon Wiki's great content creators and help their pages and articles succeed.

Search Engine Optimization Guide[]

I feel it important to note beforehand that what matters most is whether you like your pages, not whether they're the most popular or not. Everything in this guide should be secondary compared to whether you're happy with the way your articles look.

What is Search Engine Optimization?[]

The Mummy page and image are well-optimized

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing pages to make them appear higher in search results. For example, at the time of writing, if you google "Minecraft Mummy" the first result to pop up is the Mummy page, mostly followed by clickbait Youtube videos. The same can also be said of searching "Minecraft Termite" and the Termite page.

Images[]

You may notice, if you Googled those terms to confirm the results for yourself, that the images from those pages are also the first results to show up on Google's image previews. That's because images are very important to Search Engine Optimization. Having an image on your page will make the page more popular.

I will be making a separate guide on how to create images for use in Minecraft Fan projects in the coming days, so don't worry if you don't have any good images to use for right now.

Linking[]

Another secret to Search Engine Optimization is linking. The more pages you have that link to a page, the better the page will perform in terms of views. Note that the number of links in a page doesn't matter, aside from maybe very, very, very long pages. It's best to only link a separate page once per article. Though generally I make exceptions for links in things like lists or galleries.

One of the best ways to accomplish linking is Navboxes, which are collections of pages in a certain category or series. They look something like this:

Materials (template)

Note that navboxes are only really effective if the pages being compiled are in some way relevant or related. Navboxes that are well-organized and neat are also more appealing to users, causing them to be more likely to click a link and thus boost the linked page's views.

Titles and keywords[]

Another factor to affect Search Engine Optimization is Titles, and especially on the Minecraft Fanon Wiki, pages with topical names (for newly announced mobs or anticipated updates) usually get a huge boost to their viewership. Including keywords in articles has similar effects.

Of course, there's not much practical use for this when optimizing an already existing article.

Application[]

PopularPagesNov2020 — Most popular pages of November 2020

With these three factors in mind, it's unsurprising that the most popular pages are usually update articles. At the time of writing this guide, the top 5 articles are:

Unsurprisingly, all of these articles have relevant images and all but one are linked to quite a bit. The only one that is not linked to very much is Minecraft Update 1.17: The Cave Update, which is only really linked to by the Fan Made Updates category page. The reason for this is that 1.17's recent announcement has given it quite a boost in viewership, which will likely plummet to well below the other articles after 1.17 is no longer topical, including even the other 1.17 articles.

You may notice that Minecraft 1.17: End Update has fewer links than 1.17 "Adventurer's Update," which would seem antithetical given their placements on the list, but it's also an older page (meaning when the second page was first created and only had 1 pageview from the author, the first page already had far more viewership, giving it a head start) and it possibly gets a boost from having "Minecraft" in the title as well, and those factors are likely what's responsible for its reign at the top of the list.

So what does this tell us in practical application?

If you want your article to get more views, it will ideally be a page with an image or two that is linked to by a lot of other well-optimized pages.

A good example to follow would be Minecraft 1.18, as I made sure to use all of this information when creating the page. It has 9 images and separates each mob added in the update to its own page:

All of which have images, all of which are linked to by several pages, and all of which are in categories that Minecraft 1.18 is not (IE: Category:Hostile Mobs). The same is also true of the Mob Siege page, about a feature added in the update. If all the mobs and features were reduced to sections of the larger article, rather than getting their own individual articles, the page would likely be a lot less popular.

The page is also capped off by a navbox that can bring lots of incoming clicks in and send outgoing views to other update articles in return. Make sure to add your articles to a relevant navbox if one exists, or consider creating one if it doesn't. If you create a lot of articles about mobs, for example, you might consider creating a navbox that lists all the mobs you've made.

I hope this guide is able to help anyone hoping to increase their page views.

To close, I want to reiterate that popularity is ultimately secondary to what you want your articles to be like. We aim to be a site by and for creators, so don't feel any pressure from this guide to change your articles in any way you don't want to.