Meet some quetion about seting a wiki

[bigreat]

Hi,
After I took june 3rd SAT test, I buy a host and a domain to set up a wiki. I intend to use this wiki to collect test material(like sat, gre words which everyone can add and give his or her own idea about how to recite it, and some test experience).
However, I, a Chinese student, meet a lot problem( not technical), because it seems Chinese people can't accept this good method(wiki) for collect information, and they prefer forums which comparing to wiki, is more inefficiency in share infor, I think.
I don't know how to let them join this wiki and creat or edit articles which will help other younger people alot.

BTW, I also meet another quesion about how to enlist this website to google or other major search engins. I have generated a sitemap a submited it to gooole, but I still can't find my site in google.

Could some friends give me some advice about these two quesions?


Thanks.

 

[theartist87]

I don't know anything about wikis, so I can't help there....

For the Google thing, it takes some time for them to index your site. Get a robots.txt filee on your site (see http://www.robotstxt.org for more info). Submit your site to the search engines, and then alsso add your site to link directories. Just google for link directories relative to your subject, and addd your site there. This will let google know more people are interested in your site, and will allow them to rank it higher.

 

[superfly]

download mediawiki from www.mediawiki.org

 

[AmazingLoveAmazingGrace]

You also need to make sure you've got the meta tags in your site's header. Although Google will crawl around the web and look at your site, it does need information to enter into its database. I caught a Google crawler at it in my site's logs and realised I haven't got any meta tags (hence no listing). Oh well, I'm off to add them.

 

[bigreat]

Hi,
I have set up the site for a week, but I think I 'm not allowed to post the address here in order to let you give more details about it.

About the meta tags, what kind meta? is a key word meta?

Thanks !

 

[mnphysicist]

I agree with you on Wiki's, they are a lot more organized and easier to use than forums. By the same token, I can understand your users might have some reluctance to help create one. They give up a lot of interaction for better clarity. However, with mediawiki, there is also a discussion area, but I also admit there is a learning curve to get comfortable with it. In addition, with Wiki's someone else can delete all of ones work or totally changed the point they were trying to get across.

As far as meta tags. there are 2 meta tags I use, keywords, and description. Keywords are part of SEO strategy, although a small part. Description however plays a large role, not so much for search engine indexing, as it is to get people to your site, as it is what google uses when it displays search results. Here are a couple ideas to get you started.

meta name="keywords" content="SAT test experience preparation"

meta name="description" content="SAT test discussions including user experiences"

Google can take a while to index your site, years back, it was months, now it can be as little as a few days, although newer sites typically do not see frequent crawling for a while.

 

[bigreat]

HI,
My wiki site is fine now, and it is listed in 54th largest wiki sites accroding to mediawiki's official site. Moreover, google indexes it with alot pages.
However,
Still few people will to "edit".
Thanks!!!