Site still absent on Google search..

zoomer

Ok so 3 weeks ago I made some changes to my SEO options on my Smugmug site and still my website does not show up when I punch in the search term "Boise Wedding Photographer" which is the phrase I put everywhere.
Even the last thread where I posted this problem showed up on page 4 of the search but still no website.

I just saw in another thread how to check my page rank, so I checked it and it said 3 out of 10.

Also when I punch in my company name, All Outdoor Photography, none of my photos show under Google images unless they were posted by somebody else on some other site.

I may be wrong but just seems like I must be missing something, I average 160,000 hits a months on my site....just seems like it should transfer into more visibility on searches.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
www.alloutdoor.smugmug.com

jfriend

It appears to have something to do with the search terms and what Google thinks is important on your site.

If I search for "boise wedding outdoor photography", you are the first hit on Bing and the second hit on Google. The "outdoor" word is incredibly important to get you to the top. I don't know how to make it work for "boise wedding photography".

If it's any consolation, I get your ad on the Google search page as the first ad with either search.

zoomer

Thanks jfriend,
Yes once the word outdoor is added things brighten up considerably, since I specialize in outdoor weddings there is much less competition for that phrase.

Yes that add has paid for itself many times over...still would be nice to at least show up on the actual search.

jfriend

zoomer wrote:

Thanks jfriend,
Yes once the word outdoor is added things brighten up considerably, since I specialize in outdoor weddings there is much less competition for that phrase.

Yes that add has paid for itself many times over...still would be nice to at least show up on the actual search.

Since "Boise" and "Photography" are very common words, I'm guessing that you need more link juice - more things pointing to your site to get your search relevance up. Blogs, forum postings, other web sites, etc...

zoomer

Well that is why it seems so weird. I do a lot of forum posting, and I get a ton of traffic to my site plus Facebook, Model Mayhem with links back to my site and galleries.

I see a lot of other local photographers right up there in the searches I have never heard of that can't be getting much traffic or doing a fraction of the things I do try try to improve my SEO.

The only thing I don't have is a blog but most of the other photographers that show up ahead of my in the search don't either.

I have looked past 10 pages into the search, my site is just not there, when I search under Boise Wedding Photographer.

richpepp

This stuff would make you cry, it seems impossible. I'll tell you what I can see:

I just saw in another thread how to check my page rank, so I checked it and it said 3 out of 10.

3 should be way good enough, some of the other sites that come up seem to only be 1. BUT, Google do say not to focus on pagerank as it can be misleading.

Recognise also the Google web search and Google Image search seem to work completely differently. It is possible to get thousands of hits on web search and none on image search. Google image search also seems to update a lot slower although I have seen comment on the web that it works quicker for images on a blog. It always seems to take a couple of months for me.

I don't know if your Google ads work differently for images than for web search? You ad doesn't appear in either for me but I am nowhere near you. I do see ads for different people coming up in both web and image for me so maybe that works differently as well.

zoomer wrote:

I do a lot of forum posting, and I get a ton of traffic to my site plus Facebook, Model Mayhem with links back to my site and galleries.

I thought I read here that links from Facebook had a 'nofollow' tag that reduced their value for SEO

The only thing I don't have is a blog but most of the other photographers that show up ahead of my in the search don't either.

If I do an image search for Boise Wedding Photographer the first 5 pictures are all from blogs.

I have looked past 10 pages into the search, my site is just not there, when I search under Boise Wedding Photographer.

If I search Google Images for your site there are some but they are all whitewater rafting. Given that you had pictures published from that set maybe it is the benefit of good external links?

Other than that short of putting descriptions on each photo it seems that you are doing all you can within Smugmug itself. I'm not even convinced about the descriptions on photos thing as a good gallery description and keywords as you have seems to work as well. Maybe as jfriend suggests it's time for a blog

Good luck

Rich