Help:Promoting your wiki
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Promoting your wiki is essential in order to attract contributors and make the wiki grow.
Many people use search engines, such as Google or Bing to search for interesting sites, and that is precisely the reason why you need to increase your ranking in search engines.
How?
- Create or edit MediaWiki:Description on your wiki; make it a concise summary of your wiki. Search engines will use this as the description of your site when displaying search results. For example: WarWiki is an encyclopedia about all aspects of real warfare and everything and everyone related to it, from Churchill to Stalin, from World War I to the Iraq War and more!
- Customize MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage; it's the title of the wiki's main page and will also be used by search engines,
- Make a logo and a favicon for the wiki and customize the look of the site via CSS. If you don't have the required skills, you can ask ShoutWiki's Customer Support Team or the people of the Logo Creation Wiki to help you out. Many people are eager to help you out, all you need to do is to ask for it!
- Build content. This is the single most important thing in promoting your wiki; it must have something unique that other, competiting sites do not have. People will come to your wiki to look for information about a certain subject; whether it's a TV series, a movie or something like psychology, you need to outdo your competitors in this area. Make sure that all information is well-sourced and factually correct.
- Advertise your wiki via different mediums. Create a page about your wiki on sites like WikiIndex and AboutUs.org to get better visibility in search engine results. Exercise caution, though; while sites like WikiIndex and AboutUs.org will gladly welcome information about your site, fansite owners may consider excessive advertising as spamming (on forums and chats, for example) and they may ban you for doing that!
- Use social media to your advantage. You can reach an unbelievable amount of people via social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, for example.