S.E.O. and keywording couseling needed

Bed of Roses · June 3, 2011

I am getting overwhelmed with "improving" my S.E.O. and keywording on website. View me at www.karenmarieimages.com
I have researched, read, reviewed, etc. help forums, downloaded documents, etc. etc. until I am confused. Considering paying a minimal fee for someone to counsel or do the work for me. Goal, like most photographers, is to have my website stand out and get on higher search ranking. Had the website done on a SEO health test and ranked pretty low. Feel pretty confident about Smugmug, but still need to "improve" my website overall. Help!!!!!!!

Andy · June 3, 2011

Hi. Have you done everything here? http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ?
The very biggest thing you can do is to get your site linked elsewhere. Start a blog, get others to mention your site, have a FB fan page, have a twitter page, an about.me page, a google profile, etc. Next be sure to have important, meaningful album descriptions, keywords on photos, gallery keywords too (in gallery settings).

denisegoldberg · June 3, 2011

Bed of Roses wrote: »

I am getting overwhelmed with "improving" my S.E.O. and keywording on website. View me at www.karenmarieimages.com

I just took a look at your blog. The links section appears to be going to standard wordpress links - that's taking the viewer away from your site with on way back except the back button. And there doesn't appear to be a link from your blog back to your smug site. You're helping wordpress here, not yourself.

Your blog has no photos in it - why not include images there where clicking on the image takes the viewer to your smug site?

I did see one link to your web site but it isn't a clickable link. I'd be very surprised if people take the time to cut and paste into a browser window. Why no single click jump to your site?

Andy's right - inbound links to your site are very important.

--- Denise

Hikin' Mike · June 3, 2011

Without content (text), you're probably not going to rank high, even with inbound links.

Bed of Roses · June 7, 2011

S.E.O. counseling
Hi Andy, Yes, I have done everything you listed as well as from the help page on smugmug site. Have some linked sites on my bio page and I am on their sites, have a blog and it links from my bio page, have the FB fan page, the google profile, etc. I believe I could do better on my album descriptions, keywords, and gallery keywords too. This is why I wrote this original dig grin counseling request. Would appreciate it if you would review my website and see what improvements I could make. Also, refer me to someone for more detailed SEO work. Thanks!
karenmarieimages.com

Andy wrote: »

Hi. Have you done everything here? http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ?
The very biggest thing you can do is to get your site linked elsewhere. Start a blog, get others to mention your site, have a FB fan page, have a twitter page, an about.me page, a google profile, etc. Next be sure to have important, meaningful album descriptions, keywords on photos, gallery keywords too (in gallery settings).

Bed of Roses · June 7, 2011

S.E.O. counseling
Thanks Mike. Can you give me more of a detailed example on content (text)? Like where exactly are you referring this to be useful? Are you describing like my album and gallery descriptions, as well as what is in the Bio/About page?

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

Without content (text), you're probably not going to rank high, even with inbound links.

richpepp · June 7, 2011

A +1 to what Denise said as well. You could use some photos in your blogs that link back to your smugmug site i.e. don't upload a photo to wordpress but rather pull the photo from your smugmug site.

Good job on your hyperlinks though such as 'Cowboy photographs' - that's nice.

Good job with keywords as well and Google seems to know you are there. Now you just need those links

For the descriptions I think that Mike might be referring to your gallery descriptions as your captions and keywords generally seem quite good. We like to try and get about two or three lines in (and sometimes loads more) with as much stuff that identifies what the photos are about. Mentioning the location always seems like a good idea

Hikin' Mike · June 7, 2011

I'm talking about adding what you do and where your located on the home page. Looking at your Alaska gallery, the only text that I see is "Summer 1989, just purchased my Pentax K1000 prior to this trip." and the word Alaska. If you want people to find a Pentax K1000 from Alaska, then you've done a good job. If you want people to find pictures about locations such as Whittier or Glaciers, then you need to add that to your gallery descriptions. Make sense?

You can read my SEO link in my sig.

richpepp · June 7, 2011

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

You can read my SEO link in my sig.

I was going to suggest that Karen take a very good look at yours as it's great but that seemed a little presumptuous

The other thing to note is that it can take a good few months for google to start paying attention to images in my experience although the web search seems to pick up quite quickly

Hikin' Mike · June 7, 2011

richpepp wrote: »

I was going to suggest that Karen take a very good look at yours as it's great but that seemed a little presumptuous

The other thing to note is that it can take a good few months for google to start paying attention to images in my experience although the web search seems to pick up quite quickly

Thanks Rich!

I think it's going to be tougher to "be found" in Google Images then the web, at least from what I've seen.

richpepp · June 7, 2011

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

I think it's going to be tougher to "be found" in Google Images then the web, at least from what I've seen.

Yep. I have a suspicion, and it's only that, that Google images won't show any more that a few of your images until your get your page rank above 0, even if there are lots of your pages showing up in web search. That's based on nothing more than looking at which pages of our site google had images from. At the time I was really looking at it, Google would only show images from pages with a PR of 2 or more so I spent a lot of time trying to spread the PR around a bit by linking to photos all over the site. I don't think it is as bad now as with the Smugmug changes at the start of the year there was a huge change and Google now seems to have everything

Hikin' Mike · June 7, 2011

PR isn't based on a whole website, each individual page has it's own PR. I have a PR3 on my non-Smugmug home page, but I have a PR0 on my Smugmug home page. If use site:www.yourwebsite.com and click on images, you can see all of the images listed. In my case I see more images from my Smugmug site, then my non-Smugmug site. I did have somebody hack into my blog a few months ago and posted some "over 18 images/websites", so I'm trying to get my SafeSearch back to moderate again, but that's a different problem.

richpepp · June 8, 2011

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

PR isn't based on a whole website, each individual page has it's own PR.

Agreed. That's why I think it is important to spread PR around by not always just linking to your home page but rather linking deeper in to other galleries and photos.

If use site:www.yourwebsite.com and click on images, you can see all of the images listed.

EDIT: If I do an image search for your smugmug site I only see 29 images listed - is that right? I thought you meant you could see all of your images. A web search does pick up a huge amount of your images though.

Hikin' Mike · June 8, 2011

richpepp wrote: »

Agreed. That's why I think it is important to spread PR around by not always just linking to your home page but rather linking deeper in to other galleries and photos.

EDIT: If I do an image search for your smugmug site I only see 29 images listed - is that right? I thought you meant you could see all of your images. A web search does pick up a huge amount of your images though.

Only 29 if you have SafeSearch set to Moderate, but 184 if you turn if off. I'm still waiting for my images to return to normal (Moderate). Not sure why Smugmug site is being effected by my regular site. As far as I know, a sub domain is totally separate as far as PR and SafeSearch images.

I'm still waiting to see all of my images indexed from both of my sites.

richpepp · June 8, 2011

I'm still waiting to see all of my images indexed from both of my sites.

How long have you been waiting? It will be interesting to see how it changes. I tend to look in webmaster tools and check the crawl rate to see how many of our images Google actually knows about

Hikin' Mike · June 8, 2011

richpepp wrote: »

How long have you been waiting? It will be interesting to see how it changes. I tend to look in webmaster tools and check the crawl rate to see how many of our images Google actually knows about

I check WMT daily. Just looking at the sitemaps, my Smugmug site lists (images only) 111 out of 211. My regular site, lists 207 out of 237. So I have more images indexed on my site than my Smugmug site.

How can you know abbout an image using the crawl rate?

Bed of Roses · June 8, 2011

S.E.O. counseling
Thanks Rich and Denise. I have added "my" clickable links to my blog site and photos, and took out the cut and paste link info. New to the blog thing, so appreciate any pointers. Any more pointers on my changes, let me know.

Bed of Roses · June 8, 2011

S.E.O. counseling
Ok. I am having problems pulling a photo from my smugmug site to post on a blog verses uploading to wordpress........as you suggested. Copied the photo URL "and" the blog URL to try this but not working. I am missing something here. Tried the instructions on wordpress as well and didn't work. Any suggestions?

richpepp wrote: »

A +1 to what Denise said as well. You could use some photos in your blogs that link back to your smugmug site i.e. don't upload a photo to wordpress but rather pull the photo from your smugmug site.

Good job on your hyperlinks though such as 'Cowboy photographs' - that's nice.

Good job with keywords as well and Google seems to know you are there. Now you just need those links

For the descriptions I think that Mike might be referring to your gallery descriptions as your captions and keywords generally seem quite good. We like to try and get about two or three lines in (and sometimes loads more) with as much stuff that identifies what the photos are about. Mentioning the location always seems like a good idea

richpepp · June 8, 2011

Bed of Roses wrote: »

...Copied the photo URL

I don't know Wordpress I'm afraid but at a first pass did you pick up the 'Blog' link for your photo? You get it by clicking the 'Share' button above the photo, then 'get a link'. Then the 'Embeddable links' tab and finally copy the link for the size of photo that you want. On our site we use Drupal so to insert that sort of link I would switch from WYSIWYG to 'Source' mode, paste in the link, then switch back to WYSIWIG if that all makes sense

Hikin' Mike · June 8, 2011

I have the self-hosted Wordpress version, so not sure if it's the same for the "free" version. Find "Upload/Insert" text. Then click on the icon for "Add an image". You'll have a window opened up and click on the second tab called "From URL". Paste the image URL from your Smugmug site (gallery/photo) to the "Image URL" box. Fill out the rest if you want (good idea) and click "Insert into Post".

richpepp · June 8, 2011

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

How can you know abbout an image using the crawl rate?

Oops, missed your question - sorry. The answer is of course that you can't really know but if google is crawling 2 or 300 hundred images a day then I can be fairly sure that is has seen everything on my site and is just choosing not to show it for some reason.

Hikin' Mike · June 8, 2011

richpepp wrote: »

Oops, missed your question - sorry. The answer is of course that you can't really know but if google is crawling 2 or 300 hundred images a day then I can be fairly sure that is has seen everything on my site and is just choosing not to show it for some reason.

Got it. I thought I missed something....which happens a lot!

It's crude and it takes some time... but you can always type in the whole URL in Google and see which page and or image is indexed. If it's there, you'll see the link. If it isn't indexed, you'll see the "Your search --- did not match any documents". If/when I see one not listed, I've been known to use my blog, a forum(s) or my kids site to help the bots find and index the page/image. Within a few days it's listed.

richpepp · June 9, 2011

Thanks for that Hikin' Mike, that's great info. What you seem to be saying it that even though you have a PR of 0 on your Smugmug site (which is a subdomain of your main site with a PR of 3), Google images actually has almost all of the images that are in your sitemap. That's pretty much what I have been seeing now so it's great to have it confirmed. I'm fairly certain that it didn't work like that a year ago.

Hikin' Mike · June 9, 2011

According to the sitemap, I have most of my images indexed on my main site but only 50% on my Smugmug site. I'm not sure if I trust WMT though. A few days ago my SM site dropped about 20 images according to the sitemap.

I couldn't tell you about last year at this time because I wasn't promoting it like I am now.

richpepp · June 9, 2011

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

According to the sitemap, I have most of my images indexed on my main site but only 50% on my Smugmug site. I'm not sure if I trust WMT though. A few days ago my SM site dropped about 20 images according to the sitemap.

Nothing quite lines up though. We are the same in that WMT says only half of the images in the sitemap are actually in the index but a 'site:' search returns twice the number of images in the sitemap because some of the images are different sizes. Go figure

I couldn't tell you about last year at this time because I wasn't promoting it like I am now.

I've been watching it for a few years now and over the last 6 or 7 months the number of images in image search have gone up by a factor of 20 or so :wow

S.E.O. and keywording couseling needed

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