Making my camera pay for itself

[Recty]

Well, I just finished up my latest web page, every single picture is taken by me

http://www.alaskacoralfanatics.com

I've got a question for you webmasters... I've been told to get higher in Google's results from a search, one thing to do is have other websites link to your website.

Will something as simple as posting in a forum do that? Or do I need to list it somehow else?

Is there a spot on Reef Central that is crawled by Google's bot that I could permanently list this fish website?

 

[BlueCorn]

There is a ton of stuff that you can do to boost search engine traffic, unfortunately linking it here isn't one of them. :lol:

Some pointers:

All of the pages on your site have the same title and will get ignored. Having up to date sitemaps (go to Google and look for webmaster tools) will really help, as will having your content change regularly.

 

[Recty]

I put them into my webmaster tools last night and verified the site then uploaded a sitemap, so that should help. The site hasnt even been crawled yet.

As far as content changing regularly, ick, I dont think that is going to happen. They pretty much just want this website and leave it at this.

I realized the same title thing last night too but didnt feel like going through and fixing it. I'll do it tonight or tomorrow.

I also have no keywords listed in my meta section but according to what I've been reading, that has almost zero effect on placement in a google search.

 

[BlueCorn]

As far as content changing regularly, ick, I dont think that is going to happen. They pretty much just want this website and leave it at this.

That's SEO suicide.

I also have no keywords listed in my meta section but according to what I've been reading, that has almost zero effect on placement in a google search.

It's worth having some keywords, as well as a description in the header. While it doesn't have as much weight as the words on the pages they do impact placement.

I get pretty anal about this stuff on my own personal sites. My photo blog gets a ton of search engine traffic because I've got things on each page that change every time you load the page. Most folks find my main site via my blog just because it lends itself to SEO much better than a largely static picture site.

Setting up a Facebook fan page for the business can also help rankings.

Cheers

 

[wetWolger]

A few google recommendations (that you may already know, and probably were said, but will expand):

1) on linking, you will never be penalized by having other sites link to you, but your site WILL be penalized if you link to sites that google feels are spam or bad sites. Adding links on forums will count towards your link total, and help your ranking slightly, but google is aware of this. So the only links that really count are links that are on higher ranked pages. Links that are closer to the homepage will also give you better ranking than links that are 20 pages deep from the homepage.

2) Meta tags are basically worthless, google wont optimize for them, but they will penalize you if you put in keywords that are not relevant to the content

3) update, update, update!!! If you don't update your content, your page rank will very quickly go down the tubes. Google thinks people want to view sites with fresh and current content, and if your site does not provide that, then they wont provide the users. My advice is make it easy for you to update your site. Maybe add things which allow the content to randomly change (for example have a pool of photos/text that is changed every day on the website via scripts, that way different stuff is featured on the homepage on different days)

4) don't post duplicate content....if google indexes pages and it sees that text is the exact same as another website, you will be penalized

5) don't forget the text....photos are great, but google is really looking for text content to index

6) my final piece of advice, have your domain registered for at least 5 years in advanced. Google actually looks at how long domain names are paid for, and they figure that if a site has been paid for 10 or 15 years, the owner actually cares about the site and will continue to work on it. Vs domains which are only registered for 1 or 2 years, and usually end up evaporating. This will only slightly increase your page rank, but it helps, and registration is cheap so why not.

p.s. no one actually fully knows google's formula....but these recommendations seem to be pretty safe to help SEO

 

[IPT]

Grant - did they change the name?

 

[Recty]

Yeah, they changed to ACF. They owned ACM as a partnership and then they broke up, so the only owner left changed it to ACF.