Crawl Errors and poor SEO :(

Tas67

The last week or so, I've been trying to improve my SEO and Google Ranking.

As it is now, my site map is good


but I'm getting crawl errors


argh!

Also, I've followed (I believe) all the instructions on Smug mug with regard to SEO and I'm still on page 11 on Google when you search for Cleveland Wedding Photographer :cry

What do I need to do?

As a side note, I did have over 200 images keyworded but I'm uploading new pics so took 100 of those down.

Finally.....I do have a lot of images that are password protected. If I keyword those, will Google see them? My understanding is that they won't but just wanted to double-check.

Thanks!

Andy

It takes hard work and time. Have you done every single thing on this page http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ? Every album has a description? All photos have keywords and captions? Are you blogging, facebooking, tweeting? Are you getting other sites to mention you (VERY VERY important).

Tas67

Slowly but surely. I'm trying lots of different things but when you search under "Cleveland Wedding Photographer", Google has me on page 11? Ugh.

I have registered with Yelp, Google Places, Wedding sites, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. How do I get sites to mention me?

I'm ranked through Alexa at 3,889, 2623 but ZERO through Google. I have 12 Yahoo Inlinks and am Yahoo Indexed at 20.

I have also asked Google to recrawl my site but nothing seems to be working. How often do they re-crawl?

Do the crawl errors above have anything do my poor ranking? What can I do to fix them? My site map is good...but I don't understand why I'm getting errors?

Any suggestions will be helpful!

Tas67

One last thing...should I be keywording the locked down galleries or does Google not see those?

denisegoldberg

Tas67 wrote: »

Any suggestions will be helpful!

You have photos in your blog without allowing a click on your photo to drive traffic to your website. That's a missing opportunity as far as I'm concerned.

--- Denise

Tas67

Hi Denise,

I haven't worked out how to do that yet! I do have a link in my menu that goes to my website though.

Hikin' Mike

SEO-wise, I would include more text on your home page. Google likes text, so I would include a short bio about what you do and what you do...without sounding to "spammish".

On your website, you include a link to your blog, but I don't see a link from your blog to your website.

Tas67

Thanks Mike. I will go ahead and add more text to the home page. The link from my blog to my site was simply called "Portfolio". I have now changed it to Website, to make it clear.

I'll also try and figure out how to incorporate Denise's suggestion on getting the photos to link to my site.

As for the crawl errors, I contacted Smug Mug and they stated it was an error on their part but it has been fixed and should be removed when Google bot next crawls my site.

So, looks like all is good to go!

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions!