SEO Frustration
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Registered Users Posts: 203 Major grins
Last fall I moved my site to Smugmug and I've and I've been generally satisfied with the New Smugmug, and extremely satisfied with the support here at dgrin. What I am not satisfied with is the SEO results for my site. I admit to being a novice with SEO, but here are some reasons for my frustration:
1. My old site, built with Concrete 5 and hosted at Bluehost consistently showed up on the first or second page of Google searches for typical searches on services I offer. With my SM site, I can pull words straight from my Services page meta data and the Google search with those key words don't put me even in the top 15-20 pages.
2. I can go to my (blogger) blog and use the title to one of my blog entries for the Google search and I'm on the first page of search results.
3. Because of poor performance with SM video, I host my videos on Vimeo. If I search on one of my video titles the Vimeo location of the video shows up on the first page of search results, but never shows for my website. I attempted to use a 3rd party video sitemap builder to create a video sitemap for my site but it can't, presumably because of the way SM links to Vimeo videos rather than using their embed codes.
4. I have been vigilant at getting backlinks to my SM website and blog over the past five months. I get much more page views from the backlinks than I ever got with my previous site, but still I can't make it into Google searches.
It appears to me that somehow SM's SEO optimization is flawed. So my question is - has anyone been successful at placing their site high in the Google search results? If so, what is your secret?
1. My old site, built with Concrete 5 and hosted at Bluehost consistently showed up on the first or second page of Google searches for typical searches on services I offer. With my SM site, I can pull words straight from my Services page meta data and the Google search with those key words don't put me even in the top 15-20 pages.
2. I can go to my (blogger) blog and use the title to one of my blog entries for the Google search and I'm on the first page of search results.
3. Because of poor performance with SM video, I host my videos on Vimeo. If I search on one of my video titles the Vimeo location of the video shows up on the first page of search results, but never shows for my website. I attempted to use a 3rd party video sitemap builder to create a video sitemap for my site but it can't, presumably because of the way SM links to Vimeo videos rather than using their embed codes.
4. I have been vigilant at getting backlinks to my SM website and blog over the past five months. I get much more page views from the backlinks than I ever got with my previous site, but still I can't make it into Google searches.
It appears to me that somehow SM's SEO optimization is flawed. So my question is - has anyone been successful at placing their site high in the Google search results? If so, what is your secret?
Jerry
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Comments
Just curious - in the Account Settings, under Discovery you di turn on "Google Search Visibility", correct?
tailoredportraits.com
Yes, I did nothing special in Blogger other than adding labels and effort to get backlinks. In Concrete 5 I had metadata tags similar to what I have in SM and I would push the sitemaps. I wasn't aware of video sitemaps back then so I did nothing specific to that.
Under Discovery I have Google Search Visibiiity and Smugmug Search Visibility ON. I also have Site Verification filled in with my tag from Google Webmaster tools.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Title: Take One Solutions of Raleigh, NC offers a variety of photographic and video production services including Architecture & Interiors, Events and Documentaries, Celebrations, Commercials, Portraits, Photo Montage Videos and Creative Services
Description: Take One Solutions offers a variety of freelance photographic and video production services in Raleigh, NC and the surrounding area.
Keywords: Raleigh; North Carolina; Architectural; Real Estate; Event; Wedding; Commercial; Documentary; Portraits; Celebration; Photo Montage; DVD
You might read my 'SEO for the Photographer' link in my signature.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Hi Mike. Thanks for your excellent insights. I have made the changes you suggested and I hope they make a difference. I am concerned that even when I would concoct a perfect search with words from the Services page coupled with "Raleigh videographer" I still wouldn't place in google searches. Oddly though, this search would place me on the 1st page: "Raleigh freelance videographer".
Two questions:
1. My home page has no text, only a slideshow. Does google give more weight to a home page with text as opposed to the same page as a link off the home page?
2. I keep thinking I am really getting hurt in SEO because google can't index my videos because they are in the Vimeo content block. Can you think of anyway to cause google to follow those links? It is very easy to come up with searches that find my videos on Vimeo but they NEVER show the same video on my SM pages. This seems like a huge issue to me.
Thanks again for your help.
Maybe create a blog that includes the link to the video?
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
I already do that for a few of my videos but it isn't driving traffic to my site like I think a direct link would provide.
Here is the video content information Google wants sites to provide in their sitemap. Unfortunately, Smugmug doesn't do this, nor is it provided for in the video content block. I really wish Smugmug could open up an api for content blocks so 3rd parties could provide content blocks and enhancements SM doesn't have time for.
For this you would enter the following sitemaps:
/sitemap-galleryimages.xml
/sitemap-galleryimages.xml.gz
/sitemap-index.xml
/sitemap-base.xml
and
/sitemap-base.xml.gz
(at least these are the ones that I have added, if there are more please let me know
You do so in webmaster > Search Console > Crawling > Sitemaps > Add sitemap
Good luck
Lille Ulven
Hi Lille, that's helpful. Are you using this to add Vimeo video url's to your sitemap? If so, how are you getting the thumb url from Vimeo. I believe it requires a call to their api, which I am not sure how to do.
If your blog entries are indexed (and they are), then your content (your video) are too. I'm curious, but why are concerned about your videos being indexed? You are selling the videos, you just offer it right?
I wouldn't worry about submitting a sitemap to Google. Years ago you pretty much needed to, but now....not so much.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
I don't sell videos on my website. I am a freelance videographer and photographer and sell my services to create video. I provide examples of my work on my site. On my previous Concrete 5 site which I used until last fall, I had similar videos to what are on my SM site. They too were hosted on Vimeo. I was able to provide a title, description and keywords for the videos. When your Google search contained a few of these items my site would often be in the 1st or 2nd page of search results. Most weeks I would get at least one inquiry through my website. Since converting to SM last fall I haven't had the first inquiry through my site. That despite the fact that I have achieved quite a few backlinks on my current site, and to my knowledge had none on my previous site.
There are many SEO articles that say video on a website improves your position in Google searches. For one, with video visitors tend to stay longer which apparently is a key metric for Google. At any rate, Google has to be able to index the video, which AFAIK they can't do with video in the Vimeo content block.
I've seen your previous posts criticizing SM's SEO and empirical evidence seems to support that for me. I'm giving it one last push with SM support and if I can't get better results I'm going to either hire an SEO expert to assess what's wrong, or convert back to Concrete 5. BTW, the reason I converted from Concrete 5 to SM was because my old site wasn't responsive and I was concerned I would start losing position with Google due to that. Ironic, eh? At any rate, there are plenty of good responsive Concrete 5 templates to choose from now so that is a possible alternative.
There's no reason that SmugMug should have any worse SEO than another site -- in fact, we optimize SmugMug to be extremely SEO friendly and we are always updating the site to keep pace with Googles changes. Building domain rank with a custom domain can be hard, especially when Google is always changing the way it interprets links to your site. Links to and from vimeo should actually help increase your page rank more than if the video was SM video embedded on your site (they're seeing a link between vimeo's high domain authority and yours). We don't block vimeo embedding with NOFOLLOW tags and we even include google analytics script tags on vimeo embeds, so there's no reason, from the SmugMug side of things, that google should be ignoring vimeo embedded videos.
With SEO it's very easy to place blame on an incorrect reason -- google is always changing their algorithms and there could be a billion reasons why the page rank has changed (did you switch from a non-custom domain to a custom domain? Did google update their alogirthm? Do you change text that was highly ranking and it no longer exists on the page? Did a site that was giving you a strong external link remove the content linking to you? etc). It's very easy for non-SEO experts to come on here and make it sound like SmugMug sites aren't SEO strong. While I personally don't vouch to be an SEO expert, our entire team has spent a lot of time ensuring SmguMug is optimized for strong SEO performance and we continuously monitor to make sure we stay that way.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
SmugMug automatically submits everything you need. Registering your site with a search engine, at this point, doesn't do anything, and Bing even openly admits that the only reason they have a page where you can submit your site is so that people will stop asking them "how do I submit my site to you." It doesn't actually do anything - it's just there to reduce their support burden and make you feel more comfortable. The web crawlers do all the work of finding your site, provided you don't block them from seeing it.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Aaron, thanks for the feedback here and in your other message. I've loaded the MOZ bar in Chrome and will do some analysis with it. Seeing the pageranks of my site, and competing sites will be very helpful. One thing I notice is my page titles have 1700+ characters that weren't provided by me. I looked at your site and see the same. But I don't see that on non-SM sites. What is up with that? Could Google be interpreting that as spam?
I found a good article "Why Don't I Rank" that elaborates on some specifics you mention that will be useful for me.
Regarding video, here's a snippet from Google's latest published guidelines for video content.
The entries in a video Sitemap must include a link to a landing page for a video and some required information. Many of the elements in a video Sitemap are optional, but they provide useful metadata that can enhance your video results and improve Google's ability to include your video in search results.
My primary concern is that several of the items Google wants available so it can find and index the video aren't available on my site pages because they aren't entered into the Vimeo content block. These include 1) description, 2) thumb url, and 3) Raw video file URL and/or the video player URL. There is also a long list of recommended properties that also aren't available. Now it is possible SM is retrieving some or all of these via the Vimeo API, and then submitting them in the sitemap.
Keep in mind that Google has stopped showing sites' PR a while ago. The 'pagerank' that MOZ uses IS NOT Google's PR, it's Moz's algo.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Having a variety of content on your webpages (text, image, and video) will help your page rankings on their own, but Google actually has a hard time crawling a webpage and “seeing” an embedded video. If their spiders do find the video, they still can’t tell what content that video holds. So you need to help Google’s spiders find and crawl your embedded videos using two methods:
XML Sitemaps
The simple explanation here is that a sitemap is, quite literally, a “map” of the content on your website – pages, links, and content. It tells Google how to navigate your site and what you’ve got to show. This information is invaluable for Google’s spiders to find and catalog your content, increasing the chances that Google algorithms will rank your content (and, therefor your site) highly.
Structured Data Markup
Another way for you to assist Google’s spiders in locating and identifying video content specifically is with Structured Data Markup. Basically, this is a set of HTML language that Google recognizes that provides information about your video content which Google’s spiders would not otherwise be able to identify. If done correctly, this will result in rich snippets for your webpages in Google SERPs.
Vimeo support tells me SM can get all the information needed for adding embedded or linked videos from their API. But for now, they are going to give me the thumb urls so I can create and submit my own video sitemaps. This is just an experiment to see if I can get any of my embedded videos to show in the SERPs.
EDIT: Here is a recent Google article on using structured data to identify video on your page. Question - is there a way for us to add this code to our SM pages that contain embedded video? If so, which of the three sample code types should we use? And how to we place it?
EDIT2: I have uncovered on potential issue with SEO on my site. I have a personal site within my business site. I hide the personal site sidebar and show the business site navbar when in the business site. However, the personal site has an H1 block of text that says "Family & Friends Photos". If I search on that string and my business name I come up in the first four positions in the Google search results. Until recently, this may have been the only H1 text on my site, and I'm thinking maybe this overpowered my business text blocks?
Of course you want your SmugMug page to have the relevant keywords associated with that video; we could probably do a better job of grabbing the video title, description, and keywords and displaying them automatically on your SmugMug site to help you (note: when you embed a Vimeo video on other sites, like WordPress sites, they also don't automatically pull in this information, but perhaps we can be better than them and do this).
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Aaron, I believe the articles I referenced in my post above ARE talking about embedded video exactly like what we do on Smugmug. They are discussing what is needed so Google can index those embedded videos. I'll repeat part of that discussion again here:
Website
While YouTube is a great way to get your video out there and in front of a lot of eyes, the ultimate goal of your video is to generate interest in your business or product and drive your audience to your landing page. But why stop there? Why not bring your audience to your page to view your video? This is called “embedding” your video within one (or more) of the pages on your site, and it will keep your audience on your page to view your content, and increase the likelihood that your users will check out other content on your site.
Having a variety of content on your webpages (text, image, and video) will help your page rankings on their own, but Google actually has a hard time crawling a webpage and “seeing” an embedded video. If their spiders do find the video, they still can’t tell what content that video holds. So you need to help Google’s spiders find and crawl your embedded videos using two methods:
XML Sitemaps
The simple explanation here is that a sitemap is, quite literally, a “map” of the content on your website – pages, links, and content. It tells Google how to navigate your site and what you’ve got to show. This information is invaluable for Google’s spiders to find and catalog your content, increasing the chances that Google algorithms will rank your content (and, therefor your site) highly.
Structured Data Markup
Another way for you to assist Google’s spiders in locating and identifying video content specifically is with Structured Data Markup. Basically, this is a set of HTML language that Google recognizes that provides information about your video content which Google’s spiders would not otherwise be able to identify. If done correctly, this will result in rich snippets for your webpages in Google SERPs.
I received an email from one of your Heroes telling me the Google structured data markup in the 2nd above article could work in Smugmug. It does, however, require me to know the URL for the video thumbnail which I am now trying to get from Vimeo. If this looks plausible to you it would be very helpful to have an example exactly how to place the structured data markup relative to the SM Vimeo content block. And yes, if you could use the Vimeo API (and presumably YouTube also) to automatically create the structured data markup code that would be great!
EDIT1: Here is an old Moz forum post discussing how to use structured data markup to make embedded YouTube video searchable by Google.
EDIT2: BINGO - this site is a free tool for generating the structured data markup for YouTube or Vimeo video URLs. So now, two questions remain:
1. How should I add this code to my site?
2. This still requires a video site map - can SM take care of this part?
I'm still interested in adding schema.org to my embedded Vimeo videos. But as I've learned, this won't really help my position in the SERP, but it will instead display my videos as rich snippets when my page shows up in a search. I'm told this significantly increases the probability that my entry in the SERP will be clicked on. I've found this excellent article that deals with doing just this with various video hosting services including Vimeo. But I'm not able to make the leap from what this article describes, to my SM pages. If any of you who are more fluent in SM could help here I would be forever grateful!
Hi Jerry,
Why are you using a vimeo slideshow on your homepage over creating one within smugmug with keyword tagged images like I have on mine.
To be honest, I'm not sure if that will make a difference in SEO as I'm only scratching the surface of all this.
Let me know if my suggestion works as I too have played around using a youtube video on my homepage and not sure if that will hinder my SEO.
Keep me posted.
Max
Interiors Events Headshots Scapes
Hi Mike, I'm always tweaking things on my site to maintain my presence as much as possible. You mention the h1 and h2 tags in your SEO for Photographers. This is something I've always seen and has been recommended to me several times but I never knew how to implement them since my site is a SM template. Is there a way to use them? I know anytime I've had some new thing evaluate my site points were taken off for not having those. I hope I made that clear enough! Thanks so much!
Connie
www.ConnieAndersonPhotography.com
SmugMug already uses h1 tags. You don't have one on your home page because you are not displaying it. Add a title block to your home page.
You have one on your 'Before and After' page although it took me forever to see it. Could be my ancient computer though.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
When I add a title block do I just put h1 in the block? Then do I add h2? Is that something for each page I should do or just the home page? And where on the page? Does that matter?
Thanks so much for your help!
No, Smugmug already adds that (h1) tag when you insert a title block. Look at the source code.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Ok, I'm sorry I'm really trying to wrap my head around this. I've gone years just knowing it was something that might benefit my site but clueless on fixing it. Does it need to have something in the Title block? It can't be empty then? I don't want to add a title to that page but is that the only way to have the h1 tag? Again I'm sorry! lol
A
<h1>tag in itself isn't going to help. It's just code. When you wrap a<h1></h1>it tells a search engine that this page or the contents are important. It's similar to a newspaper.If you add a title block on your home page, it's going to automatically add the page's name/title. You can edit it too if you don't like the title.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Thanks Mike, one more questions. If I added those tages and put a title in it but used black to make it invisible is that ok? Google won't do anything negatively over that will they? I'm trying to maintain the clean look.
NO!!!!!!!! Google doesn't like that.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk