Search Engine Optimization

[Rocco]

Bob, that's helpful. I too have been struggling to find any matches that link to my zenfolio page. I still have to go through the tedious task of adding all the seo info to all the various elements, but thus far I'm not in the top twenty pages, even searching for a photographer (all types) with my city and state. There has to be a way to do this with the slideshow as some of the top results in my area had a similar layout.

With my account being a premium business account I have access to their free chat support.. (I've found them to be articulate, knowledgeable and very helpful.) I'll see if they have any suggestions besides what their seo video suggests, and of course I'll share here.

One thing I have read is that a large part of what makes a page show up in the first couple pages of results is how long that website has been active, and how frequently changes are made (hence the importance of a blog), and also how many other sites are linking to that site. I believe number of hits also comes into play.

By chance have you also registered the provided site map file with the search engines?

Maybe Bryan can offer some insight here? After all, his site being so incredibly searchable is how I ended up here in the first place.

[bob williams]

There has to be a way to do this with the slideshow as some of the top results in my area had a similar layout.

Your right Rocco, after some more consideration, I realized you can put thumbnails of galleries on your home page and still maintain your slideshow. I chose to put mine on the bottom. Unfortunately, all you can place with the thumbnails are the gallery comments. So now, it has me thinking that I should rename some of my galleries so that they are more search engine friendly.

One thing I have read is that a large part of what makes a page show up in the first couple pages of results is how long that website has been active, and how frequently changes are made (hence the importance of a blog), and also how many other sites are linking to that site. I believe number of hits also comes into play.

By chance have you also registered the provided site map file with the search engines?

Yes, I have read that as well---infact, for the longest time, the reference I could find to my website was through TDP. I also tried facebook.....but I am facebook stupid and didn't know how to use this tool----so I gave up on that. I still put my LIKE buttons on my site though--Just in case.

And yes, I have registered with Bing, Google and Yahoo.

Bob,
I noticed that the website embeds a lot of the pictures in a flash application. Search engine crawlers don't understand flash and don't understand flash, and they don't know that there are images inside.
Not sure if Zenfolio has a way to work around this, but it could be that the crawlers don't even know you have all these great images on your website. It should find the thumbnails on the index pages like http://rwilliamsimaging.com/p534263534, but I am not sure if they see the full size version.

You bring up a good point Arnt. I read on the Zenfolio site that it is better to rename your gallery pages with some url friendly language, such as http://rwilliamsimaging.com/wolves instead of useing a numerical reference----I just took care of that, thanks for the reminder.

even searching for a photographer (all types) with my city and state

Rocco, I tried what you did--here is what I found:

1. When I typed in "Los Lunas Photographer" I couldn't find any reference to my site (within 30 pages), even when I changed the words around.

2. When I typed in "Wildlife Photographer Los Lunas" I was #1 on the list--Yeah---the Search engine referenced the text in the "About Section" of my Zenfolio site. ---So don't ignore the "about" page and use lots of key words---With that in mind, I now have to rethink my "about" statement as well.