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Rostlab / JS16_ProjectF

In this project we will build a web portal for our GoT data analysis and visualization system. The website will integrate all the apps created in projects B-D with the help of the integration team assigned to Project E.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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SEO Performance #151

Open marcusnovotny opened 8 years ago

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

Hey Project F!

I’ve volunteered to oversee our SEO performance and was asked by @gyachdav to open an issue here to set quantifieable & trackable goals for ourselves. I’ll keep this issue up to date.

Overall recommendations (specific goals to be set)

Please let me know if anything is unclear. Looking forward to working with you guys!

Marcus

jorjo1 commented 8 years ago

Hi and thanks for this nice issue.

Do you think we should put highest priority on keywords like "game of thrones" and "got" - simply because the chance we get among the first results on Google right after we publish the site is small. I would personally experiment with some combinations with character names and cities and so on. What do you think about this?

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

Hey! Yeah, that's also my biggest concern, competition and that we only have very limited time to get us ranked. I think we should still try to optimize for game of thrones and got because those terms are gonna end up in a lot of long tail keywords anway.

Character names & cities is a good suggestion. I personally put a lot of hope into our landing pages. I'll create a few of those as static html pages and fill them with SEO content, views from our tools, some statistics etc. Those should be the primary contact points for visitors from Google. I'll create another issue here about the implementation of Landing pages when the topics are fixed on Sunday, in the meantime please comment your suggestions in the google group! Any topics that you think are highly sought after / may attract a lot of visitors are welcome :)

gyachdav commented 8 years ago

I observed that the awoiaf wiki is pretty popular mostly because of the nature of the search terms i.e. there’s not too many pages out there titled Tybolt Lannister or Salladhor Saan. Is it correct to assume that by just titling a page with a unique name we’ll get first page listing on google? If so then we should definitely make sure that all the character pages are crawled and that the title is picked up.

On Mar 25, 2016, at 2:22 PM, marcusnovotny notifications@github.com wrote:

Hey! Yeah, that's also my biggest concern, competition and that we only have very limited time to get us ranked. I think we should still try to optimize for game of thrones and got because those terms are gonna end up in a lot of long tail keywords anway.

Character names & cities is a good suggestion. I personally put a lot of hope into our landing pages. I'll create a few of those as static html pages and fill them with SEO content, views from our tools, some statistics etc. Those should be the primary contact points for visitors from Google. I'll create another issue here about the implementation of Landing pages when the topics are fixed on Sunday, in the meantime please comment your suggestions in the google group! Any topics that you think are highly sought after / may attract a lot of visitors are welcome :)

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

I think SEO is always part witchcraft at some point - you can never really tell how high you'll get. But I agree that there's a good chance. Let's put a bit more crawlable text on the character pages (at least alt text for the tools), there's no serious competition for those less known characters, could be a cheap catch!

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

Of course pagerank does it's thing, so having many different in- and out-going links will do a lot for visibility toohohoho

EDIT: which means, on our page: Links to HBO, to GoT home, to GoT official FB,...

julienschmidt commented 8 years ago

AFAIK Google & co completely ignore keywords in the meta tags since several years already. You should use certain keywords (and related words / variations) in the visible text instead.

Edit: nvm, you already said

Meta Keywords can be left out

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

Yeah.. that becomes a problem with js rendered pages ;)

julienschmidt commented 8 years ago

Google works well with js rendered pages.

You should however set a canonical URL tag on each page: https://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

jorjo1 commented 8 years ago

I am just posting this link https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ so we can pull important metrics about the page while debugging.

gyachdav commented 8 years ago

@marcusnovotny seems like none of the items has been checked yet. assigning to @Andrew094. This has a new due date April 3rd. @sacdallago please monitor.

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

@gyachdav haven't been checking since today is our project deadline. Noted in the seo action plan that I will do my first review this weekend. Expect an update tomorrow.

yashha commented 8 years ago

contact me i registered the app already at google console

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

@yashha I saw that! Cool! I also learned something new today :D

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

@Andrew094 Hey there! First heads up from my part.

You'll have to rework the Meta Data:

Keywords in Headings are also very important for our ranking. seoQuake suggests always implementing all Headings H1-H3. Try to do that and prefer H1-H3 over H4+ if they don't exist yet

Character page images have no ALTs yet

Sitemap is missing, but I think we should be able to add that with the Google Search Console easily

Also ask yourself, if there are any pages we don't want to index on Google. Then we need a robots.txt ;)

@yashha Thanks! Let's get together tomorrow afternoon / evening regarding the Google Search Console, I actually don't know a lot about it yet :)

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

@yashha I couldn't make it today. If you want we can reschedule for Wednesday / Thursday evening, unless you get along the console already, then we might as well leave it out.

@Andrew094 you're assigned but I haven't heard from you yet in this thread. Would appreciate a response! :)

gyachdav commented 8 years ago

This cannot wait forever. Reassigning to @yashha

gyachdav commented 8 years ago

there's a reference to herokuapp in the sitemap file

here is the reference: https://got-stats.herokuapp.com/machine-learning-algorithm-predict-death-game-of-thrones

yashha commented 8 years ago

@sacdallago Do you make an extra google console and analytics account?

mammuth commented 8 years ago

@sacdallago what will be the final domain name?

Need this information for the sitemap.

@gyachdav will fix it in a commit if I have @sacdallago answer :+1:

yashha commented 8 years ago

We should use both urls in my opinion But main url should be without www

mammuth commented 8 years ago

No we shouldn't, due to SEO and compatibility with tools like the webconsole and anyltics.

There should be one of the both domains where the site is hosted. The other one should redirect to that one.

I prefer www.got.show because this one is probably better recognized as an url on mobile devices or chats like Facebook. (Like we see here on GitHub). It would be a pity, if people share a link to our page and noone can click on the link... :wink:

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

Thanks for adding the sitemap, good job :+1:

Please, if still possible, rework the metadata. I gave pretty detailed examples in my post above already. If you can't make it, let me know and I'll write the descriptions...

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

@mammuth got.show, no www. We are in 2016 :D

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

@yashha yeah! I have an analytics code that is bound to the google page! What an awesome world we live in

mammuth commented 8 years ago

.show is so 2016, almost no application is recognizing it as an URL, and doesn't make a link out of it :+1: :yum:

sacdallago commented 8 years ago

:D yeah! I love it! Some DNS servers are like: WTF is .show?

gyachdav commented 8 years ago

@marcusnovotny can you please survey the site using the SEO tool you mentioned?

Please report back what score we get, where to improve etc.

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago

Main issue is the metadata. For example, "A song of ice and data" is still used as the title on every page, see my long text a few posts above. Will have another look tomorrow morning

marcusnovotny commented 8 years ago
Mostly copying my Metadata post from above:
Additional issues:

So, prioritized to do's:

Additional text / changing the Headlines might take a lot of time. I'd mostly care about the metadata and the alt text, imo you can stop afterwards, you've done a lot already @ ProjectF. Thanks for that.