A month back I wrote an article suggesting improvements for the onsite SEO of Sports Talk. Recently I was very encouraged to see some of those recommendations implemented. What this tells me is there is at the very least a team behind this platform who are willing to listen to feedback and implement changes with little fuss involved. Another certain platform where I had recommended such changes on never got around to implementing such important medium and long term improvements.
While there has been some discussion here about the long term prospects of the SPORTS token, improving the platform's visibility in Google with some simple tweaks can help increase the websites traffic and therefore exposure to new visitors and potential readers and writers who wish to contribute in the future. SEO will remain a big part of any project's marketing strategy for some time to come, as long as people keep using search engines to find information and I can't see that changing anytime soon. Sports Talk can take advantage of simple changes to help rank for various sports keyword phrases long term.
Indeed I will go as far to say if Sports Talk ranked high for various main stream sports keywords, it would increase the value of the Sports Token considerably if no other use case was made for the token! The sheer volume of traffic and eyes on the site would be worth it's weight in gold for increasing the user base, investor interest and potential advertising revenue.
Of course with this there would need to be an increase in quality written posts by writers who care about writing and engaging people with their work rather than positing uninteresting and unoriginal actifit posts.
Actifit posts make the site seem more like a cheap content farm rather than a sports discussion platform for fans
Here are the SEO Improvements that Have Been Implemented
- Relevant H1 tag now added to home page - "Sports Talk Social: Latest Sports News and Discussions". This is an important factor for determining a sites main topic. Before there was no such tag on the home page.
- Tag page Meta Titles updated
- Individual pages and tag pages Meta Descriptions are now unique was as before they just replicated the home page's description
Outstanding Changes from Previous Recommendation
- Meta Title for the home page not updated to match new H1 on home page - It needs updating to "Sports Talk Social: Latest Sports News and Discussions" to be more effective in search engines for ranking for highly searched for keywords
- Tag Page H1's need updating to match Tag Page Meta Titles
More Recommendations
Increase size of H1 on home page and tag pages.
The font size of the h1 needs to be the biggest of all text on a page so search engines can easily tell this is the main subject on a page. Superficial font size now has an effect on a search engines decision to choose what each page's main subject is.
Increase the H1 font size to roughly 2rem for the home page and tag pages.
Remove H1 tag around "Trending: All Tags".
Currently there are two H1 tags for the home page. A page is meant to have only one H1, otherwise you confuse the search engines of what is the main subject of a page. Either change "Trending: All Tags" to a H2 or remove it all together from the home page (I would recommend the latter).
Allow Spaces in Tags
Currently you can't make spaces in between tags. Instead tags are formed themselves by spaces. Instead tags should be formed by using a comma to separate each of them which will allow superior tags to be made with more than one word. This will be good for SEO so better niche categories can be created. For example as a tennis writer I would like to be able to create a tag page called "Roger Federer" rather than "rogerfederer". It looks better for the reader and allows writers to create more meaningful tags/categories.
Tag Page Filters Shouldn't Create New Pages
This is a bit more of a complicated change from a programmer's point of view but from an SEO perspective it's necessary. Currently every tag/category has four physical pages with virtually the same SEO subject matter. "Trending, New, Hot and Promoted"
There should only be one physical page for each category. If someone clicks to filter the results different, it shouldn't populate such results on a new physical page, but on the same page. This way the site is not creating duplicate pages for each tag where search engines are going to get confused about which one to rank (they won't rank all four!).
For example for tag football we have:
"Trending Football News, Posts and Discussions — SportsTalkSocial"
"New Football News, Posts and Discussions — SportsTalkSocial"
"Hot Football News, Posts and Discussions — SportsTalkSocial"
"Promoted Football News, Posts and Discussions — SportsTalkSocial"
These four pages from a search engine perspective are virtually identical and three will be ignored for ranking for people searching in Google for "Football News". Google will likely only rank one of the pages. To guarantee to be in control of which one it ranks, the only way is to just give them one page to crawl in the first place not four pages. It could also be considered "spammy" content as your just serving a search engine virtually four identical pages for each category.
That's it for now, nothing more really needs doing for on site SEO improvements after these changes are created.