Best way to manage SEO for a massive events listing website.

[jcherland]

I run a website that tracks entertainment for the entire state of South Dakota.  While I've made some fantastic strides in gaining traffic, I feel lost on how to manage all those entries in an SEO friendly manner.  I have a TON of errors showing on my crawl diagnostics and I just don't know what to do.  The nature of the website is such that there are going to be duplications all over the place.  I know that I can help some of this by getting my canonical links setup properly (that's coming in my next version of the site's theme), but what else should I do to make those event listings friendly for the SE's??

http://www.entertainsd.com

[danatanseo]

Hi JC, You're in luck. Google just rolled out a new tool, specifically for events, that helps you get them set up with Structured Data without having to go in and code your pages. It's called the Data Highlighter Tool. Here's a linke to the offical post announcing it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/12/introducing-data-highlighter-for-event.html

Here is a quote: "Data Highlighter is a point-and-click tool that can be used by anyone authorized
for your site in Google Webmaster Tools. No changes to HTML code are required.
Instead, you just use your mouse to highlight and "tag" each key piece of data
on a typical event page of your website:"

Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools and click on "Structured Data" in the left Nav. - then click the subcategory "Data Highlighter" - Watch the brief video, then click "Start Highlighting."

I am hoping (for the love of God!) they add the same kind of simple tool to allow Webmasters to markup other types of data like product videos and reviews.

I hope this helps you out a little. Given that this tool is specifically designed for sites with events, it should be a perfect fit!

Dana

[jcherland]

Thanks Dana!  I have been using microformats in the code and hoping that Google would start using that in the snippets, but so far they haven't thrown me a bone.  I'll check into this and see what I can do with it!  Thank you so much.

[danatanseo]

You are very welcome JC. Don't give up on your rich snippets. I think it was Richard Baxter who recently said that the most common problem he's seeing with micro-data is people giving up too soon when they don't see Google picking it up and displaying it right away. It could take 6 months. Just hang in there, and by all means try the tool. I bet it works