Mac_Fife, most of what I have in response is general, so I’ll not start a new thread.
SEO for JWP or Mac’s, and many other’s purposes here, is more of a rain drops approach. Each little thing you can do adds up. On the wiki every link should use the primary keywords. It needs to make sense to readers, but use keywords whenever possible. As an example ‘Getting Started with The Wiki’ does nothing for your search placement. Rewording it to say ‘Getting Started with Open Uru Wiki’ gets an occurrence of important keywords into a link. It makes sense to the reader and provides a match for the search engines. No real magic.
That you want to be found in search needs to be a consideration in the title of any post, wiki page title, category name, and on and on. SEO is not a big deal, just persistence in details. Search engines match words and series of words. Give them matches. We tend to use pronouns for common terms and the game. Search engines really don’t do pronouns. It is most important to use keywords in the first sentence of any paragraph. Dropping to pronoun use later in the paragraph is a small thing.
The only technical things that need to be done on the wiki is add the meta tag: <meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW" />
Pages need meta descriptions but I’m not sure we can use them on the wiki. If there is a plugin that generates different descriptions for each page then it might help. But, the same description on multiple pages annoys Google. So, we don’t want to repeat that meta tag unless we can change the tags content.
The same is true of the meta keyword tag.
None of those is going to do anything amazing, but they are a help and each little thing builds up.
The home page of the wiki is better. Most of the writing is obviously written by a technically educated person that reads tech stuff and papers. That is not a bad thing. But we should consider our demographic. Current stats suggest many game players fall into the 40 year old with some measure of tech background. So, if we think that is right… the wording works. If we are thinking a younger or less educated demographic then it probably should change.
If you want to promote the services the site provides… venue and resources needs to be spelled out. In ad terms provide a good first punch. So, I might write:
OpenUru.org provides free blogs, wikis, forum space, project management and other resources for Myst-Uru projects.
This is less about what you do than what will catch a reader’s attention and possibly match a search query. Free tends to jump out at people and stick in their minds.
For OpenUru.org a possible keyword is modding. People from other games call age building modding. In our community we seldom use the term. Try a search on Uru Modding. My blog post is in 3rd position. OU should be able to get good position easily because my post is NOT a heavy weight piece of optimized SEO spam.
The home page of the wiki assumes the reader knows what the Myst World is and consists of and why one might want to use the wiki. As redundant as it is I would spell it out. I would list all the Myst games to give search more matches.
If these are things you think you want to do I can make up some examples of what the page might look like.
Forum
This is a challenge for me. Considering your answers to my questions, the forum home page reveals lots of information. I can’t see a better way to arrange it. The limitations on where one can post remains a problem.
No matter where explanations are placed or how frequently people don’t read instructions until they have to. Then they usually can’t find them. I don’t have an easy solution. All my ideas would greatly complicate future upgrades. I’d make php changes to generate more seo friendly stuff.
About the only useful change I can think of would be to add keywords to the main topic titles. I suggest adding Myst or Uru wherever it is appropriate. So, Open Uru News & Announcements in place of just News & Announcements… etc etc
Shallow links are better. So,
Myst/Uru-Style Hypergrid & Open Simulators has a better likelihood of good placement than the
Hypergrid & Second Life subsection. As long as the top level sections have keywords we’ve added the most boost we can. Some where there is a line between trying for placement and using the forum.
Blogs have Pretty URL’s. If the forum software has that option, it would be good to turn it on.
Some of these recommendations may not work for you in the wiki or forum for various reasons. But, you’ll probably see the pattern and ideas.
Open Source
Yeah… no license or code is a problem. That means there is little to do. So, there is no rush.