Google dropped me like Bush in `08

iamback

bham wrote:

Well I did a search and this thread was a result of the search "Muddy Buddy Austin TX" it came up on the second page, third result. Just FYI

Not sure about other search engines, but I know Google loves forums! That's reason enough to SEO your own posts here. . At the very least put link(s) to your site(s) in your sig - vBulletin doesn't add a rel="nofollow" attribute to those so they may count in your ranking.

richpepp

iamback wrote:

Alt text for photos is definitely important for "indexing photographs" - because search engines can only index text. There should be sensible alt text for each photograph regardless in which context or theme it is shown!

Thanks for that. As far as I can see smugmug stuffs the caption into the alt text for the photos in the galleries which is nice. If I do a Google web search for site:miseast.smugmug.com I get over 50 pages of results and if I look at the cached results for a handful of those links there is always a photo with sensible alt text.

However, if I do a Google image search for site:miseast.smugmug.com there are only 36 images listed, most of which have appeared on the home page at some point or have been linked to directly from our main site. MSN only shows 50 images for a similar search. Pagerank for miseast.smugmug.com is 4 which is similar to other sites that are showing images for some searches that I know we have both good alt text and keywords for.

However I will take the advice of dogwood (and others) and start to work on the linking to the photo part of our site as well as keywords in headers, footers and anywhere else I can find. For some reason photos.miseast.org has a pagerank of zero and that may be where the problem lies. Time to start fixing up links....

thanks again - Richard

Tampa-Photography

While this is true. It is worth noting that Google does not use the keywords meta tag as a factor in SEO, and SmugMug uses the same generic keywords on every single user's site.

If you want to check to see what Google and the other search engines see in your Title, Keyword, and Description Meta Tags, check out:

http://scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html

You can enter your URL at the bottom of the page, and it will show you want the search engines see, as well as tell you if there are any problems with your tags.

Here are the keywords SM automatically stuffs into every single user's keywords meta tag, as fas as I can tell:

online photo albums, photo sharing, photo hosting, photo storage, albums, photo albums, photo, sharing, picture sharing, share photos, photo galleries, photo gallery, photos, photographs, online gallery, picture gallery, picture galleries, online galleries, smugmug gallery, smugmug, smug mug, smugmug photos, images, image galleries, image gallery, gallery hosting, galleries hosting, hosting


Try it and see for yourself. Andy - if there is an easy way to customize these, please let us know!


While this won't hurt your ranking in Google (beacuse they stopped using this tag years ago due to people abusing it), it certainly won't help SM users rank better in Yahoo, MSN, and others...



Jeff

Andy wrote:

keyword stuffing is/was typically done by webmasters - they'd write up a zillion keywords, and color them white.. then put them on a white background on the web page. Not good, in fact, AFAIK, Google has a way to spot this.

At SmugMug, your keywords are visible to Google even if you use CSS to "hide" them. This only stops them from being seen by the viewer on-screen - they are still there in the rendered code. And the robots will see them.

caroline

iamback wrote:

Having a h1 tag with just textual content is better than one with an image, but a h1 tag with an image with alt text is better than just an image with no alt text, and far better than no h1 tag at all.

Can someone please explain to me exactly how my code should read please, I don't have banner.

Thanks,
Caroline

Andy

caroline wrote:

Can someone please explain to me exactly how my code should read please, I don't have banner.

Thanks,
Caroline

Hi Caroline, can you be much more specific so the helpers can help better? Thanks!

denisegoldberg

caroline wrote:

Can someone please explain to me exactly how my code should read please, I don't have banner.

Caroline -
You can put <h1> and </h1> around anything - are you looking to put it around your site description on your home page? First you'll want to override the h1 settings in CSS since that tag by default is huge. To match your current settings:

h1 {
    font-size: 90%;
    font-weight: bold !important;
    color: #457371 !important;     /* green agate */
    font-weight: normal;
    margin-top: -15px;
}

I added the negative top margin because using h1 dropped your text down on the page. Then surround your description with <h1> and </h1> tags, like this (I used just the introduction line in you bio box, just after the <div id="showText">):

I've attached an example of the html - the forum software keeps changing it on me, so I think at text file is better.

I'm not sure that will get the results you are after though, and there seems to be some controversy over the use of the heading labels (h1, h2, etc.). I thought this article was interesting - http://www.iheni.com/html-5-to-the-h1-debate-rescue/. The first commenter clearly disagrees wtih using H1 for SEO.

--- Denise

caroline

Hi Denise,
I was about to comeback and explain further what I was trying to achieve, and also to ask whether it is considered worthwhile. However, your link to the article did partially answer my rather vague queries.

Back in 2007 when I had banner headers, iamback posted some code which looked like this for my banner :- Text file attached


Ref the SEO tips from iamback in this thread http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=63794

My question is can this same thing be done for a 'no banner' header ?
or as there isn't an image is the alt= irrelevant ?

Sorry if this is a bit muddled, I'm struggling to understand it :-(

Caroline

denisegoldberg

caroline wrote:

My question is can this same thing be done for a 'no banner' header ?

Since the alt tag is attached to the image, and the image in this case is blank, I don't think it is needed. And you already have the text availble with the title tag in your <a href= statement.

But then again, I'm guessing here!

--- Denise

RubenZ

You need to get Google Analytics or sign up for google analytics. It can track everything, what keywords are more commonly used when your site pops up etc.

southeasternphotography

No textual data on home page (issue for SEO?)

iamback wrote: »

[But your home page and other pages under your own domain (not SM-generated) can do with some work as well - to put it mildly - since on the pages I looked at there's hardly any indexable (textual) content at all, and what there is is not in best places. But I didn't see any gallery on your home page at all - though I found some linked from an "events" page but located on SmugMug]

So, does this mean if we are using the customization to separate the home page from the galleries, and there is a slideshow on the homepage with little text elsewhere on the homepage, then the search engines will be missing crucial stuff (sorry - stuff used here as a technical term!).

Troup Nightingale
Southeastern Photography
http://www.southeasternphotography.com

southeasternphotography

My Banner is in the CSS table. How do I add the h1 there since no <> brackets
How do I use the h1 to surround my banner code since I have this in my CSS table? Seems like the <> brackets are not used in the CSS. Or maybe it is just the way I coded my banner (as specified in another thread). My banner is working fine. I added the ALT as described in this thread. Not sure if I did it right. It didn't break the banner, but maybe it is wrong and is doing nothing for the search engines.


Troup Nightingale
Southeastern Photography
http://www.southeasternphotography.com

Andy

southeasternphotography wrote: »

How do I use the h1 to surround my banner code since I have this in my CSS table? Seems like the <> brackets are not used in the CSS. Or maybe it is just the way I coded my banner (as specified in another thread). My banner is working fine. I added the ALT as described in this thread. Not sure if I did it right. It didn't break the banner, but maybe it is wrong and is doing nothing for the search engines.


Troup Nightingale
Southeastern Photography
http://www.southeasternphotography.com

Hey Troup, post this in the customizing forum so the right helpers can help - thanks!

southeasternphotography

Andy wrote: »

Hey Troup, post this in the customizing forum so the right helpers can help - thanks!

Thanks Andy, I guess I will have to re-post it there. I posted it here because it was in THIS thread that the code and commands were listed like around posts 13 and 14 I think. Suppose during the new post I will have to redirect them back to the proper posts in this thread so they will know what I am talking about...or do alot of cross pasting. Oh well...

I guess I am going to have the same issue with my post just above the one you replied to.

Troup