SEO Tips, Tricks, and Links for 2013

Cosworth's SEO thread is a good read and there is a lot of information there, but a lot has changed since 2008! If you haven't read the thread, it is located here.

If you have no idea what SEO is, you may want stop reading and get a hang of the idea first since I'll be skipping over some of the basics. I'll be assuming your own website (not a Zenfolio or Facebook site), know what Google Analytics is, and know basic html (W3 Schools is a great resource for those who may need a refresher or help with anything outside of your current knowledge base).

Fix that website of yours! First and foremost fix the problems you have made while making your website. This is the area that really helps your website shine, so if your site is craptastic and needs to be replaced with a new one, do it! If you have to go through all these issues just to turn around and start over on a new website, then you are just insisting your time. Check out Theme Forest if a new site is in order and let me recommend a site that is responsive (scales with the screen size which makes it great for mobile applications), high resolution (those new MacBooks are only the start), and html5 (latest and greatest standard gives some noticeable advantages over the other standards in regards to speed when working with unique designs). I'm not going to get into the WordPress vs a Normal Site template, but I'm sure you know what is right for you based on your experience.

1. If you are concerned about your SEO, then my first resource to point you towards is WooRank. It is subscription based, but they allow you to do one report per week on a free basis. You will end up with a report for your site with several things to work on. Each section has 3 little targets (importance) and 3 little gears (how hard it is to solve). If you don't understand a section, click on the question mark on the right for an explanation. Work through as many as you can. Most are pretty simple, but depending on how large your site is, it should take quite a while to fix some of the issues. It is also quite beneficial to subscribe to WooRank for the resources, even if you only do it for one month. Get as much data as you can while you are a subscriber, there is a lot of good information.

2. If you have successfully worked your way through WooRank (or have already hit your weekly limit with WooRank), then try your luck with Marketing Grader. It works similarly to WooRank, but helps keep you more active with your website (which of course is a big plus with Google). You should be checking your own site after you are making changes, and checking up on your competition.

3. Now, lets try out IWebChk. This digs down a little deeper than the others and gets into the technical aspects that need improving. Speed, W3C Errors, and page layout make a big difference with SEO. If Google can't search your site correctly, then you will probably end up with errors that directly affect the end users experience.

4. Now if you haven't already setup goals in Google Analytics, you should do it now. It will help you track your marketing and see what is and is not effective. GAConfig has some useful tools, but you should be using the event tracking tool. With a modern website, we shouldn't have a separate confirmation page when a form, or another event, is completed. The tool will walk you through the process which will you will add a small section of code with the form submit button. This is very useful for tracking marketing campaigns (Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc...) even when using the same landing page.

5. Use landing pages! It is a digital version of a pamphlet to get people to use your service (photography). Here are a few examples on Theme Forest that you can purchase or use as ideas when you create your own. You will probably have several good ideas when designing your page, and if you do, use Experiments in Google Analytics (found under the Content section). Experiments will allow you to test multiple designs of a webpage and figure out which one(s) work the best. Just remember to use a large enough pool to see which one(s) are the most effective (5 conversions total, probably isn't enough to decide a clear winner).

6. Google Webmaster Tools is a great way to check for crawl errors and submit a sitemap to Google if you haven't already.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools isn't as popular, but with the recent interest from Facebook with Bing, you may want to seriously consider looking into what Bing considers important.

8. Open Graph is new and may or may not help your website with the new Facebook search that is in beta now.

9. Rich Snippets and Schema helps Google and other search engines by defining things on your website that cannot be accurately automatically defined currently. This will help the overall user experience when searching for you and is currently used in the Google Search as well as the Google Now app.

I'm sure there is plenty more, but this should be a good start for anyone looking into taking SEO seriously, which should be everyone actually running a business.

It's black magic I tell you, black magic... burn him, burn him!
I'm serious, he's a witch.... he turned me into a newt........(I got better).

OK more seriously, thanks for posting this. Looks like some interesting stuff. Think I should make an effort to work through this as one of my (slightly late) new year's resolutions.

Thanks for the updates.

If you're going to teach people about seo, you need to teach them about trends, directions, changes like panda, penguin, disavow, social media relevance, and the like. I still see people in photography forums trading links and promoting link farms.

Link farms?

Picture North Carolina wrote in post #15531441
If you're going to teach people about seo, you need to teach them about trends, directions, changes like panda, penguin, disavow, social media relevance, and the like. I still see people in photography forums trading links and promoting link farms.

There is just so much regarding those trends and it is all very time sensitive (i.e., NOW), and a few months from now, they might not be effective. The things I mentioned should be good for a very long time and most will improve user experience directly.

Yes, reciprocal links and link farms aren't the best links to build. But by doing that once or twice, you won't fall off the face of the map.

Disavow is a very powerful tool, and could easily cause more harm than good if you don't know how to use it. And the benefits are slim (Google says that it may or may not take your suggestions into account).

Panda, Penguin, etc... If you aren't spamming your website out there every chance you have, then it shouldn't have a large effect (if any) on your site performance.

Social media (and website updates) is one that Marketing Grader pushes for really hard, but again by spamming your own links out there constantly isn't going to do any good. You need to think of Facebook, Bing, and Google as all being separate, and figure out which one you are most concerned about and go after that. What Google likes isn't the same as Bing or Facebook.

I have to ask, what are "landing pages"? FWIW, I don't own a mobile device.

A landing page is where you would direct traffic to. Say you were running an Ad that said "Super Awesome Wedding Photography". You would want to send them to a page that had information about wedding photography and not your home page that also had information about landscapes. Here is an example of a landing page (link).

And then to determine the effectiveness of that landing page, you would track the percentage of that contacted you for more information or bought your product. If you had an idea that may create more conversions, then you can setup an experiment through Google Analytics which will show the original version to some visitors and a modified version to other visitors to see which one receives more conversions.

I see (i think). I guess if you wanted to run adds, using a landing page would be useful.

Yes. You could also direct inquires to a certain page if they are requesting more information or something along those lines.

subscribing! Looks like good info here.

I'm just going through my site updating for new keywords, this will help too Thanks!

Hi Adam, are you saying that Zenfolio SEO suck?

Landing pages are the devil. No one likes them and no one benefits from them. All they do is create a barrier to content.

Tigerkn wrote in post #15574694
Hi Adam, are you saying that Zenfolio SEO suck?

I'm not necessarily saying that. Just that without complete control over your website you won't be able to make the changes you want or need to optimize your site fully.

cdifoto wrote in post #15574725
Landing pages are the devil. No one likes them and no one benefits from them. All they do is create a barrier to content.

Landing pages, as you are referring to them, are spammy sale pages, and actually those work in some markets (not necessarily photography). A Landing page is the page a visitor views when they first enter your website. For example, if you send a bride a link to your website, would you rather send her to:

A. Your home page with no information, only links to your main site (which has information about portraits, seniors, landscapes, personal, and finally weddings), Facebook, twitter, and your blog.

Or

B. Directly to your wedding content that displays a small gallery, information about your packages, and how to set up a meeting with your to view more of your work.

B is the optimized landing page for your wedding inquiries and by using it as such, it solves the problem of your potential booking getting lost in your website and getting frustrated with you.