Search engine optimization for GRNsight web site

[kdahlquist]

We want to do some things to optimize the GRNsight home page so it is found by search engines.

• add search metatags
  • gene regulatory network
  • gene regulatory network visualization
  • +/- web app
  • automatic graph layout
  • adjacency matrix
  • add others here
• possibly other techniques

[dondi]

After doing some reading, the final approach taken for this was to use Google Search Console. This entailed:

• Adding a verification file to the site
• Generating a sitemap (fortunately this can be automated by Jekyll)
• Waiting for indexing/analysis to arrive (not yet arrived as of this writing) Traditional keyword tags are no longer used by search engines because it is too easy to “cheat” with them. Instead, intrinsic content is examined more closely. One tag that is useful, however, is the meta description tag. This web page discusses its value.
• As it turns out, GitHub Pages has support for this also, among other features. As an initial configuration, the site-level documented here were then set up, and can be refined continuously as Google Search Console supplies on-going data on search characteristics. (particularly differentiation of these attributes for specific pages)

Having taken these actions, some time is needed for engines to capture and index the new content. The intent is to now use Google Search Console to monitor this activity.

[kdahlquist]

Need to add 155 descriptions to each page. See beta page for how to do this.

[kdahlquist]

I went ahead and added the metadescriptions to each page, but now the About page is broken. I can't tell that there is anything wrong with the code, but the page isn't styled anymore. @dondi, can you take a look? Sorry.

[dondi]

OK, I was able to fix it. You'll love the root issue: it's the apostrophe problem all over again! But this time, it's the colon because as you can see, in this file format, the colon serves as the separator between the attribute name description and its value. The solution is special notation to deactivate recognition of the colon—you will see it now in about.html.

[kdahlquist]

Urgh--I thought it might be something like that, but I thought it might have been the comma's. Silly me. Maybe we just shouldn't have punctuation at all. Thanks for fixing it. I'm closing this just for the satisfaction of closing something, even though we are going to look at it again when some data has been collected by Google in a few weeks.