A Mogul To Be

Building a fantasy sports site part 2

June 30th, 2007 by Robert

In this post I will cover the SEO (search engine optimization) aspects of building my friend’s fantasy sports site. If you haven’t read part 1, you can now.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

The first step to setting up the SEO for the site was getting the search engine friendly URLs configured. Joomla! has a built in way of doing this but the generated URLs are not human readable and leave out the words from page titles and such. This is important since search engines see these words as keywords and rank accordingly. For example, look at the URL of this post. You will see the title in the URL structure. That is what we mean by search engine friendly URLs.

For accomplishing this in Joomla! there are many extensions available; some free and some not. I ended up choosing the extension from ARTIO. Before you make your choice be sure that whichever extension you choose is compatible with any other extensions that you plan on installing now and in the future. This is important since these SEF plugins rewrite the URLs that the CMS naturally uses and this can cause problems with other extensions that gather data from the URL, such as forums.

SEO & Titles

Another extension I installed was JoomSEO. This is a mambot that changes the title of the page based on how you configure it. Like URLs, the title of the page is important in a couple of ways. First it should be unique for each page in your site and contain keywords for the page and/or the page’s title (duh) and not just the title of the site.

This is important for the users of search engines because the title is what Google shows as the link in its search results. The example below is a site that has the same title for every page. As a result the user can’t easily determine what is on each page.

The way RotoTown’s Titles are set up is that it shows the site name first, then an excerpt from the first paragraph.

Too Many Links To A Single Page

Another problem with a CMS (or blog for that matter) is having too many different URLs that all go to the same content. For example, with Wordpress, you have the primary link, a link from the archive —such as /2007/06/post-title—, one from the category —/category/post-title—, etc. Google follows all of these links and ends up seeing them as duplicate content. Not good. Duplicate content gets put into Google’s supplemental index and doesn’t get any Google love.

There are a couple of ways to fix this. The first is with the robots.txt file, which is a simple text file that tells Google and other search engines what do crawl on your site. In the case of a blog, you tell them to not index any URL that contains ‘category’ or ‘2007′, etc. by adding a line like: Disallow: /2007/*

For RotoTown however I didn’t have quite the same problem. The one I did have was with a feature of the CMS that allows the user to email, print or print as a PDF, any story on the site. Each of these little icons represents a URL that all point to the same content. So what I did was modify the file that displays this code and added in the ‘nofollow’ attribute on the links, such as:

<a href=”url-here” rel=”nofollow”>

This tells search engines not to follow that link and thus no index it.

There are other things of course to optimize the site for search engines, but these are the easy to do items.

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