SEO and Google

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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
Hi All,

I have a website I'm happy with from Squarespace. I love the interface they give you, good templates and clearly a lot of work has gone into it. Could not recommend them enough.

However, I am struggling to get my site found. In the last few weeks, I've updated the wording in every page, including naming the images with photography in my area....I've put "wedding photography edinburgh" with combinations and I've in the last week submitted a sitemap to webmaster tools, which has so far indexed the pages, but has a "-" next to 191 images not yet indexed. If I type in combinations of "wedding photography/er Edinburgh or Edinburgh area"....I'm no where to be found.

Any tips welcome. Does it just take time ?
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
Browncoat said:
http://nikonites.com/photography-business/16763-photographers-guide-seo.html

If your site isn't self-hosted (aka your own .com), you're going to have problems with visibility. You have little to no control over your SEO efforts.
Click to expand...

Many thanks, I'm reading it now. Squarespace do give you a fair but of scope to improve your SEO, so I'm just updating it now, such as the H1 and Meta. I see other photographers in my area have name:location, so I have just done the same.

Thanks
J
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I've got this to say about Bluehost, which is where I host my site. My name has been tossed around the interknot since I was first able to connect at low dial-up speeds - from Smoking Pipe forums (I used to carve) to sites for transcribing guitar charts to various guitar forums to photography sites, you name it. So when I'd Google my name I'd get a plethora of stuff from all over the place. I do not do business under my own name, and only include my name as a "Photography by ..." tack on to the name of the website.

So, I just plugged my name into Bing and my website was 3rd on the list, behind my LinkedIn profile and a blog post about me on the MeFOTO website. Google, unfortunately, doesn't find me there until page 3, but that may be because I've abandoned that search engine due to their collecting of, well, just about every ounce of information they can find on me (though my 500px page is #1, which links to the site, so it's not all bad). Yahoo search seems to match Bing, as does DuckDuckGo.com, which supposedly provides pure, unfiltered results. Bluehost states that they work hard to boost SEO scores, and it seems that they're people of their words.

The most interesting things I found was that I have a page on IMDB. Damn - I'm finally getting recognized for my star status!! LOL
 
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PaulPosition

Senior Member
One thing that's important, if you want to get indexed, is that the text on the website is actually text that "robots" can read and not just a picture showing nice calligraphy, cut up into little pieces and crammed into a <table> tag (the "Photoshop-made webpage"). Google and such do not read pictures or understand sound bites.
 
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WayneF

Senior Member
GameOfMoans said:
However, I am struggling to get my site found. In the last few weeks, I've updated the wording in every page, including naming the images with photography in my area....I've put "wedding photography edinburgh" with combinations and I've in the last week submitted a sitemap to webmaster tools, which has so far indexed the pages, but has a "-" next to 191 images not yet indexed. If I type in combinations of "wedding photography/er Edinburgh or Edinburgh area"....I'm no where to be found.

Any tips welcome. Does it just take time ?
Click to expand...


Adding a new site does not mean Google will have ever heard of it. Google finds it two ways.

1. Someone links to your site, and when Google updates that sites crawl, they find the link to yours. You could link to your site here at Nikonites for example (soliciting comments for example), and Google would probably find it.

2. You submit your site to Google directly, the link here: Google

It can take a few days to show up.

You may want to submit your site to other searches too, like Bing and Yahoo, etc.
One way to find those submission entries is to search Google for:

Submit site to Bing
Submit site to Yahoo, etc.


The ranking of your site in searches (if it is on page one or page 100) depends in part by how many other sites link to it, and the ranking of those sites. You sort of pick up some of their ranking, sort of.
 
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480sparky

Senior Member
Fear not. Now that you're out there, the "Google" phone calls will start to flood in.

Telemarketers "with Google" and "from Google" will be contacting you, claiming to put you on the first page of search results.

Once your site is established, you can expect 2-3 calls / emails a day from them.
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
480sparky said:
Fear not. Now that you're out there, the "Google" phone calls will start to flood in.

Telemarketers "with Google" and "from Google" will be contacting you, claiming to put you on the first page of search results.

Once your site is established, you can expect 2-3 calls / emails a day from them.
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LOL....at this point I'd be delighted as my site would have to be on google first and be found on google. I've been splashing Wedding Photographer Edinburgh everywhere on my site, even on the blog....yet you type "Wedding Photography Edinburgh" into Bing or Google, and I'm not on a single page...you need to type my name + wedding photography and then I'm on page one.
 
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PaulPosition

Senior Member
Like Wayne said above, you do need "referencing". Links from not-your-website that do point at your website. It used to be "the more the better" (hence the ugly, search results-like, webpages you sometime hit in your browsing. They're called link-farms). Nowadays, Google, Bing et al will try to determine the relative importance of where the link originated.

Anyway : don't go spamming (for reasons explained above) but do put links to your site wherever they really would fit. Here, your blog, flickr, indexes like the yellow-pages, etc.
 
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480sparky

Senior Member
GameOfMoans said:
LOL....at this point I'd be delighted as my site would have to be on google first and be found on google. I've been splashing Wedding Photographer Edinburgh everywhere on my site, even on the blog....yet you type "Wedding Photography Edinburgh" into Bing or Google, and I'm not on a single page...you need to type my name + wedding photography and then I'm on page one.
Click to expand...

Your site needs to be up and running for some time before it starts to improve in ranking.

What these spammers do is do a Google search, then click on page 10 and start calling everyone after that.

Trust me..... you won't be delighted. Every phone call will, in effect, cost you money.
 
Browncoat

Browncoat

Senior Member
WayneF said:
Adding a new site does not mean Google will have ever heard of it. Google finds it two ways.

1. Someone links to your site, and when Google updates that sites crawl, they find the link to yours. You could link to your site here at Nikonites for example (soliciting comments for example), and Google would probably find it.

2. You submit your site to Google directly, the link here: Google
Click to expand...

1. Link building is not as effective as it once was. Google consistently updates its search algorithm (currently Panda 4.0) and the value of links has diminished considerably over the last 5 or so years. User-posted links on Nikonites contain the <rel="nofollow"> tag, which means Google does not assign PageRank to them. Most forums and comment sections use this designation to protect themselves from bad and/or broken links, spam, paid links and untrusted content.

2. You must own the URL to submit it to Google.

On a side note, Jack will probably notice my disdain for the Oxford Comma in this post.
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
I have noticed and have no idea how to fix the following Crawl errors...there are more like this listed;

Sorry, can't copy screen grab, but URL e.g. /blog, Responce code 404

I see 13 more like this....not sure what this means or how to fix, and is this causing me issues being found.
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
Update, I've just gone through Google again....I'm on page 24......so I need to work on getting up the rankings as noone will go through 24 pages....but it's a start!

It's from the stick Browncoat did on SEO...the header and description...the changes I made this morning have got me on Google search results....so big thanks for that.
 
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Browncoat

Browncoat

Senior Member
WayneF said:
I doubt that is true.
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I'm not surprised. :rolleyes:

Yes, any site can be submitted to Google by anyone, but perhaps you'd care to explain how that benefits their SEO? This thread is about SEO, and in that context, you have to own the URL to gain the benefits thereof. Google sends HTML ownership verification that must be uploaded to your server, so they do know which sites you own.
 
Browncoat

Browncoat

Senior Member
GameOfMoans said:
I have noticed and have no idea how to fix the following Crawl errors...there are more like this listed;

Sorry, can't copy screen grab, but URL e.g. /blog, Responce code 404

I see 13 more like this....not sure what this means or how to fix, and is this causing me issues being found.
Click to expand...

The URL of your blog is: /edinburgh-wedding-photography-blog, not just /blog


​
 
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WayneF

Senior Member
Browncoat said:
I'm not surprised. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Yep, I do try to be a seeker of truth and justice. :)

Yes, any site can be submitted to Google by anyone, but perhaps you'd care to explain how that benefits their SEO?
Click to expand...

Well, you said it could not be submitted unless owned, to which I took exception.

And site submission does seem to be the very first principle of SEO.
And the OP original complaint was: "I'm no where to be found."
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
Thanks, I'm in the admin of the site now, and on the Blog page, the configuration has Navigation Title (The Name for this page, as it appears in navigations.) I have "Blog" currently. Page Title (The name of this page, as it appears in the top of the browser window). I have "Blog" currently. Lastly URL (The Unique location slug for this page). I have edinburgh-wedding-photography-blog.

So I assume I have mis configured something wrong here......
 
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GameOfMoans

Senior Member
I've just change Nav Title and and Title, and it just changes the hyperlink on mysite and on the page header. So does the URL slug need to be the same I wonder as in just blog.

Update: it was that....the URL slug.....I'm fixing the crawl errors now...live and learn!
 
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