Dolphins Draft Post Mortem
April 14th, 2008 | Published in django | 2 Comments
Update: the companion Rails version of the Dolphins Draft Database is up.
So as of this morning, a Google search for Miami Dolphins Draft Database listed the basic Web app I built and launched last Friday at #2, second only to the Sun-Sentinel’s database. This pretty clearly underscores the importance of search engine awareness when designing database apps. In this case, Google indexed every link on the site, and I didn’t even deploy a sitemap for Google to find. Good clean urls help, too. These are areas where Web frameworks like Rails and Django simply are more effective than a basic PHP/MySQL app, to say nothing of Caspio apps. Unless you plan on having your traffic driven mainly by bookmarks, clean and consistent urls and results that aren’t displayed via Javascript alone are important concepts to understand and practice.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:43 pm (#)
Fun exercise!
From the how to make friends and win on Google department, I recently added a small number of tags to posts on my blog and the amount of hits I’m drawing through Google is amplifying rapidly. The SEO consultants aren’t making this stuff up.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:18 am (#)
It gets better. The Scoop is #2 in a search for “dolphins draft database,” and #18 in a search for “nfl draft database.” (Technically, it’s the post about the database…) As Ben said, the SEO folks aren’t inventing this out of the clear blue sky.