Tag Archives: Rails

Rails SEO Tips 90% Completed

Posted on November 19, 2007 by in Rails, SEO

Too many projects, too little time.  I got most of my Rails SEO hints page completed tonight, after finally implementing more of the suggestions I was making in Daily Bingo Cards itself.

The Table of Contents

The page is still a bit of a work in progress, of course.  I intend to keep it updated and continue gradually expanding the content.  Plus it is 2 AM and I really have no effort to do make the code samples more pretty (what can you expect — I built them by hand in notepad — lots and lots of ampersands, let me tell you). 

If you have any comments about the article, feel free to leave them here.  If you know any Rails developers who might be interested in the resource, please feel free to pass it on to them.

SEO Tips for Ruby on Rails

Posted on October 29, 2007 by in Rails, SEO

I’m working on this article as another bit of linkbait, and its about 33% of the way finished at the moment, but I thought I would give you guys a sneak peek.  If you have any comments, please, feel free.  If you want to blog or otherwise link to it, go right ahead, although it is very much a work-in-progress at this point.

The excerpt:

There is much to love about the Ruby on Rails framework. Don’t Repeat Yourself. It Just Works. Massive productivity gains, happiness returning to the world of boring CRUD apps, and a certain sense of panache in programming. However, while Rails has sensible defaults it doesn’t get everything right out of the box. This article focuses on how you can improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your Rails site the Ruby way and get a

  • more usable,
  • more popular,
  • and more profitable application — with less work!

You can read the rest of it at Rails SEO tips, located at Daily Bingo Cards.  Why did I put it over there?  Frankly, I expect this to make the rounds a few times in the Rails community, many of whom have their own blogs, and I expect it to get linked to heavily.  There isn’t a Definitive Rails SEO Resource yet, and that page has delusions of grandeur. 

My blog is PR5, has a few hundred inbound links, and has little direct impact on my monthly bottom line.  Daily Bingo Cards is PR0, has about two inbound links, and has the potential to double my take-home pay.  Choosing to get the links over there rather than over here was not a hard decision.  Granted, the inbound links will not be that targeted to start out, but they’ll greatly help get the trust-ball rolling while I wait a few weeks to start ranking for my targetted snowflake queries.

P.S. When I post this to the social networking sites, for the ones which value a little bit of controversy with their morning coffee, the title is going to be “Default Routes Considered Harmful, and Other Rails SEO Tips”.  If you’re in the less-geeky end of the pool the reference might not make sense to you, but trust me, Considered Harmful is a (heated!) conversation starter around the Slashdot set.  I’m not saying it just to be controversial, though — leaving the default routes in a publicly-accessible Rails application is a bad idea, for the reasons I go over in the article.