Over time, SparqFest can help you raise the profile of your festival in search engines through its smart search engine optimization (SEO). This article describes what we do from a search engine perspective and how you and you creators can take advantage of it.
Our SEO is a Benefit to Your Creators
It's easy to focus on the benefits of what SparqFest does for your festival from an SEO perspective, but the it's also a huge benefit to your creators.
The best SEO comes in the form of high-quality links across the web. Your SparqFest public site creates links to project pages and social media accounts that search engines can crawl and raise the profile of your creators.
Sitemap
We generate a sitemap.xml file (a file used by search engines to discover content on your site) twice each day. This file describes every single page on your SparqFest public site and any language-specific links.
Static Pages
The most important aspect of the SparqFest public site is that almost all of the pages (certainly, all of the ones that matter) are static from a search-engine perspective. In other words, a crawler requests a SparqFest page and can interpret all of the content and links without the need for JavaScript or other programmatic API calls.
Many sites that are heavily driven by database content like SparqFest will rely on JavaScript frameworks to pull data in real time from the server. Unfortunately, search engines have a hard time reading such data. We'd rather have search engine-friendly content that is a few minutes out of date than have the content accurate to the second.
That's not to say that we don't pull time-sensitive data from the database. Anything that's time sensitive does make calls back to our servers to get current information or use JavaScript to calculate the current state. The initial load of the page, however, contains everything a search engine crawler needs to index your pages well.
Links, Links, Links
We ask for a nauseating number of links from you, your creators, your sponsors, and any other stakeholder on the site. We make sure to include these in relevant web pages so search engines can identify the relationship between your site and the external site.
Link Back to Your SparqFest Site!
Links to your SparqFest web site and from your SparqFest web site create a virtuous cycle that raises your search engine profile. We strongly recommend that you link back to your SparqFest site and encourage your creators to share their SparqFest pages on social media and link to them from their web sites. The more links to your SparqFest site, the higher it ranks, and the more valuable your links back to other sites become.
You should never save some time and think “Oh, no one is going to click on my Instagram link.” Even if no one ever does, that link has value from an SEO perspective.
Images
All images have descriptive text associated with them. This feature not only helps search engines, but it is critical to accessibility for people with visual impairments.
Open Graph and Schema
Open Graph is an open standard originated by Facebook designed to let Facebook and other third-parties better understand the content on a web page.
Schema is an open format promoted by Google that gives structure to unstructured content that helps Google and others better index web site content.
Both standards overlap in many ways. To ensure that your festival pages are best indexed and leveraged by any possible consumer, SparqFest generates pages with both Open Graph and Schema content where appropriate.