google SEO experts... help me. I'm confused

[picturecrazy]

Ok, I'm just really confused at to how these rankings go. Been trying to move up the ranks on certain keywords and it seems to be working.... But this is what confuses me.

One day I'll be up to page 5, and then all of a sudden I'll be on page 10, then page 8 the next day, then page 54 the next, then page 5 again, then page 23....

it's like... how on earth can my ranking bounce around so much on a day to day basis? How the heck do you get up the ranks and stay in the relatively same area? I just seems bizarre to me. There must be something I'm totally missing.

any experts out there?

[cosworth]

Do you have a sitemap.xml file generated yet? Does your content change daily? I log in and change my hidden front door keywords all the time. I generate a new sitemap.xml with every build of the site. Do you submit your sitemap.xml to Yahoo as well?

Are you watching where you are on Ask.com? Ask.com is a better search engine inmy books and I hope it catches on. No searching through 40 pages of crap for sale to find what you need.

On google if you type in "New Westminster" +wedding +photogrpaher I'm on page 1 trillion. On Ask.com, page ONE!

[qtaran111]

Google's pagerank algorithm bases its rankings primarily on the number & quality of external links to a website. As Googlebot crawls the web (which it does all the time) and updates its database, the rankings change.

To get good, consistent high rankings, get lots of good quality external links to your site, write interesting content (text) containing keywords, use CSS + HTML (if using flash include a non-flash css+html version), check regularly for broken links, use good page titles (related to your keywords) and use a sitemap (preferably google-friendly xml format).

Forget about keyword meta tags (no search engine worth its salt uses them) and forget about hidden keywords (e.g. white text on white background) as again decent search engines will ignore them.

Finally, remember SEO is a black art and (like photography) takes patience to master...

[michael_]

great tips qtaran and jason.

[Binning]

Hi Lloyd, you have a really beautiful site. I'm a webmaster for several sites that rank #1 for their keywords on Google. I have noticed recently that any change in page title or any behind the page changes (html) can throw off the ranking for a week. Page content changes are fine, but change a page title or meta description and a site is thrown back into the bin for re-ranking. From what I have seen you should never change a page title or behind the page item without also changing text on the visible portion of the page -- it can be viewed as nothing more than an SEO manipulation attempt and gets punished. Google does provide some credit for longevity but if you change a non-visible part of the page without a change in content, you're in harms way if you are well ranked.

One of the challenges with a photography site is designing it to both present well and rank well on search engines. Qtaran111’s comments are right on and are a good summary of how you should go about SEO for Google.

It is hard work and it is very text and content intensive to get a high ranking. The more competitive your keywords, the more work you’ll have to do. I don’t know if you do your own web site work, but if you do it is one of the least expensive marketing efforts you will undertake and it will grow in value as people increasingly rely on the web for searching local services.

A couple of suggestions: I assume that your primary focus is marketing your services in Edmonton and that your primary service is wedding photography. A couple of quick suggestions:

1. The title of your page (that appears in the blue bar on top):
It currently reads: Welcome to Night and Day Photography - Edmonton / Destination Wedding Photographer

Suggested change: Edmonton Photography | Wedding Photography in Edmonton and Calgary
(also do not hesitate to add additional services or related words to the title ie. wedding reception photography or other variations of wedding photography that someone might search) It is ok if all of the words do not appear when someone views your site. Note that whatever words you use in your title should also be used in the text of your website and in particular the page for which the title is used..

Why make this change? Google gives higher priority to words in the title from left to right. If someone is searching for 'night and day in Edmonton' you rank in position 3 and 4 with your current title, but only your friends and Cole Porter fans will search those terms. Use the terms that people search for that match your services

2.Page Banner (which states the name of your business)

Your page banner currently states the name of your business with a very small subheadline (premium wedding services) Consider a subheadline that is only a few font types smaller than your business name that includes Edmonton and Calgary (and whatever else you would like).

Why: the banner area of the page is prime space and the size of type can be larger than in the rest of the page while still appearing attractive. The size type you use for keywords as well as their location will help your with rankings. People are searching for geography and a specific service – match the keywords to their search terms

3. Text and keywords.

A quick look at your home page text seems to indicate you get the importance of using keywords and are trying to make it work for you. I realize it seems a bit crazy that it is the pictures on your site that will make the sale, but it is the words on your site that will get a search engine ranking for prospective clients to see your pictures. But that's just the way it is. You can use text on the bottom portion of the page, or between pictures and it shouldn't hurt your rankings and will still keep your photos front and center. Also, note that Google looks for "alt text," a description of each picture or graphic for those who are visiting a site but cannot see the image. Use your keyword in these but dont be 'abusive' in repeating the same terms for different pictures. Describe the picture and use the keywords.

4. Depth in your site

Google will search your site and count the instance of words. It is a major contributor to how your site is ranked. They will measure how closely certain words are spaced. For example, if you type "wedding photography" 300 times in a row, you'll be busted as a spam site. Be creative in how you use keywords and in how you can create depth in the site: create multiple pages that cover many different aspects of shooting a wedding and the type of shots that you take. Use text to describe the pictures and use keywords. Spread out the keywords but do it in a way that makes sense to a visitor and is interesting. Depth, the number of pages on a site will help with your ranking (and you don't have to link to all the pages from your home page).

5. Upflow

The text and keywords that you use in the many pages you create will accrue to your homepage ranking. Your site doesn't have to look like a list of keywords to rank well. Use the depth of your site and creativity to accumulate keywords. The result will be a highly ranked home page that looks great.

I hope this helps and isn't so long that it gets cut off.

Best,
Tim

[michael_]

can you list the sites binning?

btw lloyd your wedding blog shots are outstanding, the more i look at wedding shots the more i want to do it.

[Binning]

Photography is so unique to SEO. Pictures aren't recognized on Google so text and words are crucial to search rankings.

[michael_]

Thanks Tim.

I just did a small business course and one of the main focus points in the marketing was SEO, i knew about keywords previously but not to the extent, im having my site redesigned so any advise you may have would be great

edit: just saw your edited post above, great

[qtaran111]

Great tips Tim (Binning),

I concur with everything you said and anyone starting out performing SEO for their site should go through these steps.

For more free tips about SEO for Google, see: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The Webmaster tool is really useful as it will give you:

- Analysis of googlebot's crawl of your site (including unreachable URLs)
- Query stats (search terms used to reach your site)
- Analysis of sitemap
- etc

Also, if you want to find out more detailed info about your visitors, referals etc, then you might want to consider Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics which I use for all my clients' sites.

Finally, if you have some budget available, you could consider Google Adwords.

[figmented]

ive worked hard at figuring what google uses to rank my site, and now im on page 1 (was on page 5) for 'gainesville texas photographer' (+portrait, +wedding)

the way I got there was by googling my own domain name, and seeing how it describes it and what info is displayed. Took over a week because sometimes it would not change position for 3 days.

I also use analytics, and it shows you what people search for in google and end up on your page, and you can modify your site to reflect better descriptions so you'll be ranked higher.

Also, I suggest creating a professional looking myspace page, because its such a huge site, my myspace tops the google searches as well as my website for some unknown reason.

also posting a lot on forums (include your web address in your signature) and your own personal blog helps you very much so.

I've had people go to my website for googling 'wedding photography + high resolution dvd' and getting a few hits only because i had an article in my blog about it.

crazy.

[cosworth]

Forget about keyword meta tags (no search engine worth its salt uses them) and forget about hidden keywords (e.g. white text on white background) as again decent search engines will ignore them.

I beg to differ. I have dynamic content in a form of a daily updated blog. I rebuld the site minum evey 6 months. I use google's and yahoo's xml schema, I keep the code as clean as possible. Doesn't really do much.

The number on thing that get's me up on my ranking is my hidden keywords. Searching for a photographer in my area, I'm on page ONE of Ask.com. All due to my hidden keywords. Google is a sponsored site hell for wedding photographers in my area and I can't even find my site.


The only thing that gets me up in the pages without spending say $600 a month is the keywording.

Open up Ask.com and type in "new westminster" +photographer. You see the bots have crawled my hidden keywords. Look at my site listing and you can see I artificially bumped up. It hasn't updated anything (you can see why) since I rebuilt last week but it works. Google does it and so does Yahoo. So I guess they are no good search engines.

[qtaran111]

Jason, you are right and I stand duly chastised and corrected.

See, whoever said people don't admit they're wrong on internet forums? Who said it is getting rude around here ;).

N.B.
Before everyone goes off and stuffs their site with hidden keywords, remember it does technically violate Google's terms: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

[cosworth]

There must be some AI there that allows it/crawls it when there is no text on a front door.

The best thing a photographer can do is add a blog that CLEARLY points to your galleries and that has some juicy relevant keywords:

Trash the dress, sparklers, 888 etc.

[picturecrazy]

wow, some GREAT info here. Thanks especially to Binning for taking the time to give such a detailed explanation. I am going to really take your info to heart when I go through a site redesign.

and I'm happy you like my pictures, cider. still have much to learn.. will never stop! If anyone has more to add please throw it in!!

[cosworth]

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

[Binning]

wow, some GREAT info here. Thanks especially to Binning for taking the time to give such a detailed explanation. I am going to really take your info to heart when I go through a site redesign.

and I'm happy you like my pictures, cider. still have much to learn.. will never stop! If anyone has more to add please throw it in!!

Your're very welcome I hope it helps.


Jason, I looked at your site and photos and they are really impressive. And I understand how frustrating it must be to have search engines like Google and Yahoo ignore your site because it lacks text.

Unfortunately, that is the way that Google and Yahoo search for the time being. Hopefully, they will figure out a way in the future to deal with sites that are highly graphical rather than text based.

If one wants a high ranking on Google, it would be a massive mistake to do as you have done and put language on their pages that is black text on a black background. With Google it is explicitly prohibited and defined as cause for being removed from their search engine.

I don't make the rules at Google, but I think it is important that others on this site know the risk of developing their site in such a way. Google accounts for a majority of search engine searches and it is too important to the marketing of starting photography businesses to not be forthright.


On the issue of meta tag keywords (google), from what I can tell they will ignore a list of more than ten keywords (or phrases). However, they will acknowledge a listing of up to ten keywords as long as they appear on the page. As this is a black art and Google doesn't share their algorithim, I can't say that as fact.

[cosworth]

Google doesn't sell me. I do. I am sooooo buried deep in google that I focus on other search engines.

I've long said that google is dead. It's been dead for along time. You can't search for anything there without 10,000 sponsored links that just want to sell you someting unrelated to what you're searching.

I didn't always have hidden keywords. I'd submit to google, they crawl me and so forth. I played the google game. I'd go there and google jason hollister. You'd think that they'd give you the first combination of those two search words plus dot com and see if it resolves. Nope. Page 3. I'd sumbit again, sitemap.xml, link to mine from another million other places. Still, page three. Then I'd go to Ask.com - first hit. That pretty much said it for me.

Google may not like hidden keywrods, but the technology used to keep out the anglefire kiddies and the myspace freaks still works on the same principals as hidden keywords. It's just teched up. Upsold, repackaged.

Yahoo doesn't ignore my site, nor does google. I'm just buried under 100,000 sites that PAY. If you google my name now, I'm on page one for Ask.com and Google. It works. But remove my name and do my city or photographer and see what you get. nothing to do with photography or New Westminster/Vancouver. Just like the old days of hidden keywords...

[cosworth]

funny, this thread is page 5 for those same search parameters.

[Banbert]

I dont claim to be a SEO expert but I have spent a lot of time learning about it in the last year and have been happy with what I have managed to achieve. For the last 6 months we have been able to knock our adwords spend down to virtually nothing (less than £1 spent in the last 6 months, thats less than $2 total) beacuse were getting pkenty of hits and enquiries from Organic search results, the time you invest in SEO is definitey worthwhile.

You have a really nice Lloyd and are definitely one of the inspirations to many of us in the wedding photography forum, but heres a few things I would hcange about your site.

* Some of your page titles are the same, they should all be different even if its just adding a word like you have to some of them like the pricing page.

* Add more links within your own site to your own pages - Most of your pages have one link from within your own site linking to them, embed more links in your content to your other pages, so if you say "contact me" somewhere on one of your pages make it a link to your contact page. Consider another complete menu along the bottom that has all the links your sitemap does.

* Most of your image alt tags are all the same, change them so they are at least a little bit different from each other and in a relevant way.

* Consider more links from your blog to your website - Rather than having one link from my blog to my website I have linked key pages as a side menu on my blog. Multiple entry points into your site are good!

* Consider subscribing to http://www.webpronews.com/ they have great articles on SEO, you get the odd marketing email but its easy to unsubscribe if you decide its not worthwhile.

* If your not registered with http://www.photolinks.com/ then this is very worthwhile as they have a great ranking and its a free link to your site.

[Binning]

Great recommendations Banbert! Its easy to overlook the use of internal links.

The other really smart thing that you're doing is for your external links you are using descriptive keywords rather than just listing your domain name. The "Warwickshire Wedding Photographer " link that you use in your signature here is a perfect example of how to get the most benefit from external links to your site. Google matches the words used in a link to your site text as one measure of relevance and quality of the link.

[Claire]

Wow, this thread is bookmarked!

[Binning]

Lloyd, you made some good changes to your site. I hope it helps!

[picturecrazy]

Yeah, I got listed on a bunch of places, did some of your seo suggestions, and now using my main page to announce any news to keep content changing. Now I'm consistently on page 2 of my chosen keywords! That's freaking awesome! Thanks guys!