SEO Performance

[marcusnovotny]

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)

• Minimize page loading time
• Avoid long URL parameters
• Be mobile ready: See https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/
• Add keywords where they matter. Each site has a certain topic with relevant keywords. Try to place those:
  • In the meta data
  • H1, H2 Tags
  • URL
  • Semantic tags (italic, bold)
• Most important overall keywords: game of thrones (7,5 million monthly searches on average), got (370.000 monthly searches on average)

Specific goals

• Register the site on the Google search console to get hints from Google itself: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=de&pli=1
• Provide an XML sitemap
• Provide a robots.txt for restricted areas
• Provide alt text for all images, videos, tools…
• Add Metadata for all views (Add Metadata to all views + SEO #42).
  • Titles (highly important for ranking): Between 10-70 characters
  • Meta descriptions show up as the description text for our Search engine results and should be relevant to the content / title to attract visitors. They don’t have to be unique though and are irrelevant for the ranking. Between 70-160 characters.
  • Meta Keywords can be left out.

Recommended tools

• Google Search Console (as mentioned above)
• SEOQuake for Chrome: A nice browser extension which generates an info page with relevant SEO Stats for you. There’s even a “Diagnosis” tab which highlights missing data / features and gives further recommendations. Highly useful!

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

Marcus

[jorjo1]

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]

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]

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 [email protected] 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 :)

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[marcusnovotny]

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]

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]

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]

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

[julienschmidt]

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]

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

[gyachdav]

@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]

@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]

contact me i registered the app already at google console

[sacdallago]

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

[marcusnovotny]

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

You'll have to rework the Meta Data:

• The Page Title is an important ranking factor. It's currently "A Song of Ice and Data" on every page. That's way too unspecific first of all (you can use up to 70 characters, right no we use 22) & second the keywords are useless. We should put the domain name & Game of Thrones in every Title and then add a specific String with important keywords for the page. Suggestions:
  • Homepage: Game of Thrones Analysis - GoT Show
  • /map : Game of Thrones Characters put on the map - GoT Show
  • /characters/Jon Snow : Jon Snow's Game of Thrones Journey - GoT Show
• The Meta description doesn't influence ranking, but it does influence the appearance on the Google Search results. Please define at least a unique Meta description for every major tab (Home / Characters / Map / About. The Character pages can "inherit" their description 😉 Suggestion:
  • /characters/whatever: Is your favourite character in danger? What do people tweet about him or her? All recent Game of Thrones statistics on GoT show
• Meta Keywords are completely irrelevant, might aswell leave them out.

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]

@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]

This cannot wait forever. Reassigning to @yashha

[gyachdav]

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]

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

[mammuth]

@sacdallago what will be the final domain name?

• www.got.show or
• got.show

Need this information for the sitemap.

@gyachdav will fix it in a commit if I have @sacdallago answer 👍

[yashha]

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

[mammuth]

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... 😉

[marcusnovotny]

Thanks for adding the sitemap, good job 👍

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]

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

[sacdallago]

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

[mammuth]

.show is so 2016, almost no application is recognizing it as an URL, and doesn't make a link out of it 👍 😋

[sacdallago]

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

[gyachdav]

@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]

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]

Mostly copying my Metadata post from above:

• The Page Title is an important ranking factor. It's currently "A Song of Ice and Data" on every page. That's way too unspecific first of all (you can use up to 70 characters, right no we use 22) & second the keywords are useless. We should put the domain name & Game of Thrones in every Title and then add a specific String with important keywords for the page. Suggestions:
  • Homepage: Game of Thrones Analysis - GoT Show
  • /map : Game of Thrones Characters put on the map - GoT Show
  • /characters/Jon Snow : Jon Snow's Game of Thrones Journey - GoT Show
• The Meta description doesn't influence ranking, but it does influence the appearance on the Google Search results. Please define at least a unique Meta description for every major tab (Home / Characters / Map / About. The Character pages can "inherit" their description 😉 Suggestion:
  • /characters/whatever: Is your favourite character in danger? What do people tweet about him or her? All recent Game of Thrones statistics on GoT show
• Meta Keywords are completely irrelevant, might aswell leave them out.

Additional issues:

• Very little text. SeoQuake measures Text / HTML ratio and recommends exceeding 15%, on our character pages we're at 0.7%, homepage aswell, ranking page around 5%
  • Images still have no alt text, which would help. There's 7 images without alt on the homepage for example.
• Not implementing H1 through H3: We always have an H1 headline, but sometimes use H4 while leaving H2 or H3 empty (e.g. homepage, ranking). SeoQuake recommends filling H1-H3 first, they have higher SEO Importance. If H2 / H3 are too big they could be styled differently. Don't know if it's worth the hassle, would see that as a minor issue.

So, prioritized to do's:

• Rework Metadata, can't stress it enough
• Provide alt text for the images

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.