I have been doing some reading lately in an effort to try and increase search engine visibility for my Zenfolio Website and have learned some things along the way. I put a lot of effort in naming, putting comments, key words etc on my website photos, but haven't had much luck finding my work on the search engines. I have been able to find my photos, but they are usually the result of something I have posted here, not my website. Based on my reading I discovered that if a search engine crawler cant see key words on your homepage, it may not look any deeper. So, I spent some time yesterday and this morning rewording my "welcome message" to include keywords, references and links to other areas of my site. I am also starting to think that the "slideshow" layout is a bad idea for this reason. If you put your gallery thumbnails (with Titles and Discriptions) on your homepage, then there will be more pertinant text for the search engines to find. I haven't done this yet, but I plan too.

So results of my efforts so far:

Unitl yesterday, when searching for "hummingbird photo tutorial", The only reference I could find was my "tip" here on the TDP----I went down about twenty pages and couldn't find any reference to the tutorial on my homepage. Today, I referenced the tutorial on my homepage and now I am on page TWO on Google. My Blog is also on page two.

Now there hasn't been enough time to see if my hit rate goes up yet, but time will tell.


I will be changing the layout of my homepage so that it includes as much pertinant text as possible---hopefully this will add to the visability.

I'll keep you posted on what I discover---but keep in mind, that this is a slow process that often takes months to see results.