Just wanted to thank Tom and the others who have given input to me and others from time to time. With the feedback I got here and with the independant research I did, I have been on page 1 for quite a while now. My listing is 3rd on the search page...only behind a very well known photographer's two pages.
Much like Joel, Tom's advice helped me land on page 1 a few months ago and I'm actually #1 for a couple search terms in my area. I've also noticed my blog posts hit page one for the terms I'm targeting within a week of posting them. I've noticed a little increase in traffic and I've booked a few weddings from SEO but it wasn't the game changer I was expecting based on others experiences. I'd imagine we'd have more success from it if we were much cheaper.
I'm also very happy that I didn't spend any money on SEO. It's actually saving me money since I stopped doing google and facebook ads early last year.
Thanks Tom for the great info posted. There are a lot of changes with SEO and Google page ranking all the time. As their implementation gets better, it gets harder and harder to "juice" your website with the information. Those of you photographers using Wordpress, I would also suggest that you check your gallery code to make sure that alt text and title text on images show up and you populate those fields with your information on the photo and also your brand/name. They'll show up in Google image search from then on. SEO doesn't require a genius at coding, it just requires someone that can keep up with all the rule changes for Google Page Rank and other similar algorithms.
Does anyone who uses Zenfolio know how their site helps/hurts your SEO ranking? Is there a way to improve SEO with a zen gallery? Does google crawl the zenfolio galleries and take note of the keywords, tags on the individual photos there? Just curious. I probably should ask the Zenfolio people.
Can someone please explain no follow links regarding seo? I've Noticed some blogs I've been featured on Liink to me under no follow. Does this mean my site isn't ranking better because of the no follow ?
delsol9400 wrote:
Can someone please explain no follow links regarding seo? I've Noticed some blogs I've been featured on Liink to me under no follow. Does this mean my site isn't ranking better because of the no follow ?
As far I know, that is correct. No-follow tags are put in to discourage being used for link building.
joelconner wrote:
As far I know, that is correct. No-follow tags are put in to discourage being used for link building.
I think that's true, although there is some belief that nofollow links can build credibility and audience (from a social perspective) which is some how accounted for in the grand scheme of things. Take Twitter and Facebook for example, all the links are nofollow but having a presence there is good. The links tend to be organic and part of good content rather than being there just for the sake of link building.
delsol9400 wrote:
What would be the incentive of a blog about weddings, to not want to build links for photographers whose work they feature? How does this help them?
Keeps people from posting nothing but comment spam. Think about how many SEO loaded comments a blog like Style Me Pretty would be getting if if it allowed that...I bet they would have 5 SEO mooching comments for every 1 legit one.
I guess i don't understand about comment spam... If there's a nofollow before a link to my web site within an article written about MY photography, what does that have to do with comments?
D. Diggler wrote:
What's the difference between these two?
Sorry for the slow reply, been a busy week. Alt text is alternative text for photos if someone is blind or if you choose to not show images. Title text is the Title or name of your photo. The way how these two differ is that the Title is just that: a title. Alt text is supposed to describe what is in the photo. Google gives points to sites that use both and have higher quality content.
