feat: Improve SEO to find keyman.com when searching for keyboard and language

[darcywong00]

From Sept 2023 team planning meetings, a user suggested to improve SEO to find keyman.com when searching for keyboard and language.

References

@jamespostsil has some experience from another project so we can ask him for tips.

@dhigby emailed me a Notion link about adding metadata for search corresponding to specific languages, so that search for a given language will return a link to that keyboard.

Top Issues

The following 6 issues were identified by seobility.net and I’ve provided what may be simple solutions beneath. Lets fix these and see if it helps get Keyman on the first page.

• Add a meta description
  Just add this to the header: 🔗 feat: Add descriptions for major pages 📓 #486

<meta name="description" content=”Unlock the power of your language with Keyman's customizable keyboard software. Available for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices, we support over 1,000 languages to make communication seamless and meaningful.”>

• Fix errors regarding the language markup of your webpage 🔗 fix: Handle optional language tag in header #497
  The language is not specified in the HTML markup

• Improve the page response time
  The analysis site I used was complaining about a 1.08 second response time, claiming it should be less than 0.4 seconds. You probably have bigger fish to fry, but maybe the suggestion below will help.

• Try to reduce the number of JavaScript files
  The site pulls in 4 different javascript files. Maybe these could be combined into one?

• Use good alternative descriptions (alt attributes) for your images 🔗chore: Add img alt descriptions for main page #487
  18 images have no alt attribute! The content of alt attributes is used by search engines and you are penalized by Google without them.

• Improve heading texts
  The following are all the headings on the home page:

<h3>Keyboards</h3>
<h3>Products</h3>
<h3>Downloads</h3>
<h3>Developer Tools</h3>
<h3>About</h3>
<h3>Help</h3>
<h3>Keyboards</h3>
<h4>(2000+ languages)</h4>
<h4>Featured keyboards</h4>
<h3>Products</h3>
<h4>Core Products</h4>
<h4>Downloads</h4>
<h3>About</h3>
<h3>Developer</h3>
<h1>Type to the world in your language</h1>
<h2>Choose a keyboard for your language</h2>
<h4>Search over 2000 languages</h4>
<h2>Core products</h2>
<h3>Keyman for Windows</h3>
<h3>Keyman for macOS</h3>
<h3>Keyman for Linux</h3>
<h3>Keyman for Android</h3>
<h3>Keyman for iPhone and iPad</h3>
<h3>keymanweb.com</h3>
<h3>Keyman Bookmarklet</h3>
<h2>Developer Tools</h2>
<h3>Keyman Developer</h3>
<h3>Keyman Engine</h3>
<h2>Keep me updated</h2>
<h2>Subscribe</h2>
<h2>Keep in touch</h2>
<h4>Support</h4>

Kudos for your H1: Type to the world in your language

However, the other headings are repetitious and don’t tell the story of Keyman. The H2’s are:

• Choose a keyboard for your language
• Core Products
• Developer Tools
• Keep me updated
• Subscribe
• Keep in touch
  It's probably best to change the latter three to something else.

The menus all use h3, and it is hard to tell whether that harms SEO.

Additional tips

Robots.txt

The robots.txt is blocking AhrefsBot from indexing the site because they were causing too much traffic. We can block them from sub-pages while allowing the top page to be indexed by changing robots.txt to:

User-Agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /*/
Allow: /$

Keywords

Keyboard could be considered our top keyword for the site, but it is not featured prominently enough:

• It does not occur within the first 120 characters of the page
• Not found in any image attributes
• It is not bolded anywhere on the page

Metadata

• There are no Meta descriptions 🔗 feat: Add descriptions for major pages 📓 #486

[darcywong00]

From the Keyman team meetings Nov 2024, we decided to prioritize localizing the keyboard search (#384) over SEO for the remaining 18.0 cycle.

[darcywong00]

The robots.txt is blocking AhrefsBot from indexing the site because they were causing too much traffic. We can block them from sub-pages while allowing the top page to be indexed by changing robots.txt to:

We won't make any changes for robots.txt