Re: new website draft 8: almost giving up

[Mark Polesky]

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> I side with the general recommendation that Google gives, which is to
> focus on building a good website, and trusting that the resulting
> search ranking reflect reasonable metrics on quality.  There are
> specific guidelines on
> 
> http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
> 
> For obvious reasons, I do not want to involve myself in this
> discussion any further.

:)


Graham Percival wrote:
> Perhaps AFTER the new website and 2.14 are out there, we should
> have a publicity drive where we ask our users to look for links to
> lilypond.org and send polite updates for that text to the relevant
> webmasters.  Everybody says that the most important thing for the
> website rankings are the links TO your site, not the actual site
> itself.

Well, one link from a high-ranking website does far more than ten
links from low-ranking websites. The quality of your link-network
is at least as important as the quantity of links.


> But this should only happen after we have the new site done and
> ideally translated into one or two languages.  So let's get back
> to work and leave this bikeshed behind.

Why wait? The value of links that point to the current lilypond.org
will not drop when we change the look of the homepage. If you have
a website, go ahead and link to lilypond... there's no need to wait.
Especially if you have a high-ranking website (although off-hand, I
don't know of any among the developer lot).

By the way, you can also google link:lilypond.org (no quotes) to see
who our highest-ranking linkers our right now. The UK TeX Archive,
mutopiaproject, laymusic, and some others... there are 913 by
google's count. Note well, though, that finalemusic.com only has 439.
sibelius.com has 1770.

Note also, that lilypond.org is only #12 for 'music notation' (no
quotes) and we *are* on the first page for "music notation" (with
double-quotes). We're only 2 behind Sibelius, and 4 behind Finale.

Honestly, both Finale and Sibelius have the uninterrupted phrase
"music notation software" in their html description (although only
Sibelius properly puts it in the<metaname="Description" ...>
field). I think that helps them. But we can beat that...

I think we could boost our rank significantly by having the exact
phrase "free music notation software" in our description field.
Neither of the other two could legally get away with that. And if
you guys are willing, I think we could achieve the crowning blow
by putting that exact phrase also in the <title> field:

<TITLE>LilyPond, free music notation software</TITLE>

Maybe it lacks the poetic qualities of "...for everyone", but it's
worth discussing if you're going for SEO.

And Graham, I think the endless multitudes of us "free"-wheeling
googlers vastly outnumber the representatives of refined civility
in Canada and Singapore. Combined. :) Take it as a compliment.

- Mark