JasperVriends An interesting question would be: what would be better, does Flarum core need to cover everything, including extensions of other developers, or just the simple SEO part and let extensions like mine cover the more advanced stuff around SEO.
My thought is that core doesn’t need to get too extreme about SEO. Because once again, I don’t even believe some things are as important as some others believe. Leave it to a specialized extension for all the reasons you stated.
And, no one has fully addressed my original question. What is Flarum missing and can you prove it’s a big deal? And before you link to an article, remember that you can probably quickly find the opposite opinion. So far I’ve heard header tags. But, the Internet doesn’t agree that structure is crucial anymore (see SE Journal article I posted above). And I’ve heard the meta description. But, @JasperVriends’ extension takes care of that. Even without that, search engines can pick out a snippet from the page and make that the description. I think I once read that even if you have unique meta descriptions, Google will sometimes ignore it and use what they want for the description.
So, I’m kind of being a broken record here because I want everyone to really think about what is important. Is a SEO tip you heard truly needed? Or, is it a myth? Or, was it important in 2005, but now it is not? Or, is it a little important, but not the end of the world?
Due to all the SEO myths out there that is yet another reason why I agree with @JasperVriends that core SEO should continue to be minimal.
Core should probably just stick with these simple guidelines:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Don't deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.
The above is from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary. The things they say make sense to me; it seems legit.
