Improve my sites ranking

[mtdmitchell]

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HI

firstly may i apologise for my first post which im asking for help, This site looks very useful and i will be sticking around.

I have created a website for my wifes photography business- www.justrebeccaphotography.co.uk

currently we only get a10-20 hits per day how can i improve this?

im going to add a blog section soon, the site has over 300 followers on face book.

searching Locally for photogrpahers - sutton coldfield - the site is top of most relavent seaches. But i wish to expand this to include birmingham \ midlands searches.

[bobred]

HIsearching Locally for photogrpahers - sutton coldfield - the site is top of most relavent seaches. But i wish to expand this to include birmingham \ midlands searches.

I would create a new page with on page SEO aimed at “birmingham photographers” (or w/e is the appropiate keyphrase you're targeting) and build as many backlinks as possible to it with the appropiate keyphrase as your anchor text.

[findlite]

Or..... you could do it this way....

Buy birminghamphotographers.co.uk - build a small site optimised for that term and get someone on odesk to use angelas packets and pump 100 links into it?...

You'll have a no1 in a short while which is bound to bring your wife some business.

[mtdmitchell]

thanks for the advise, im not familair with with angelas packets? could you explain?

[danidon639]

Its suggested to do SEO for backlinks and traffic to the site. The more number of backlinks you do, you get more traffic. and even yo make your site publish in social networking sites so that many users of the site can have a look at the site. This also gives traffic. This gives good rank to the keywords and to the site also.
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internet search engine marketing

[mtdmitchell]

Thanks for the Advise, i have now purchased Birmingham Photographer, Wedding Photography, Family Photographer, Female Photographer and my wife has started to post blogs about recent photography shoots.I Just need to work on the SEO of the site now, I have also purchased some Backlinks from odesk as suggested...Never knew i coud l do that! will the Backlinks damaged the sites ranking in the long run or even make google black list it?

[Brendon]

>> will the Backlinks damaged the sites ranking in the long run or even make google black list it?

Buying links certainly can do both, but don't stress about it. Even bans are reversible. Couple of things :

1) Write titles for humans as well - currently, it's obviously written for SEO. Consider, would you click on that if i came up in a SERP? I'd use something more like "Rebecca Mitchell, female photographer in Birmingham, specialising in wedding and family photography". All the terms you are targetting are present, but it looks like it was written for a human. Same for meta descriptions

2) Redesign the home page a bit. I know photography is a visual thing, but don't make me scroll down to see textual content. When you do get visitors, you want them to interact with the site, then make an enquiry, so show them something they can read

3) I got a very wierd problem with the site, where the blog posts were 301 redirecting to themselves, causing Firefox to tell me that it had detected that the site was caught in an infinite loop, and breaking. If that happens to SE spiders, you won't get indexed. Worth checking your logs, see if you can find that and fix it

[mtdmitchell]

Thanks Brendon, your advise is spot on , When writing titles and Meta tags i always think more about the keywords than the actually users!

Are you still getting the 301 redirect problem, i was setting that up when you posted this yesterday so im hoping that was the problem?

[LinkBuilder]

Forums are a great resource to seek advice and opinion in topics you are new to. Unfortunately, when it comes to a subjective matter such as SEO, blindly following what people advise you on forums is a surefire way to waste your time, effort and money.

Someone suggested creating an additional page on your site and optimising the page with your chosen keyword. Another person mentioned buying a new domain, creating a mini site and then funneling the traffic to your main site.

While both these suggestions are sound in theory, IMO it would have been better for you to choose the former option. By choosing the latter, you have unwittingly made an error of judgement by opting to register for a .info domain as opposed to a .co.uk. I'm presuming the .co.uk version was already taken, and you decided the .info was a good alternative?

Unfortunately, in the eyes of Google, .info domains are synonymous with spammers and as such your new mini site will have a harder time to rank compared to a co.uk or .com domain. If search engine optimisation is compared to taking part in a race, by choosing a .info domain you are starting in the changing rooms. With your shoe laces tied in a knot.

While its not impossible to rank a .info website, you'll require more backlinks of higher quality to gain trust of the search engines. Unfortunately, the forum links you purchased from ODesk are low quality/spammy.

So now you have a brand new spammy domain, and some spammy links pointing towards it. In the eyes of Google (who you want as your friend and to trust you) all the signals point to your site being rather spammy with zero/little trust, which in turn will result in poor rankings until you can prove them otherwise. Not only that, but your wife has already spent time and effort posting content on your new spam site. Which hasnt been indexed. And neither have the links you purchased. All this after seeking SEO advice on a forum

Take everything you read on SEO forums with a pinch of salt ( that includes what I have written above).

[mtdmitchell]

Linkbuilder, maybe your right about the. Info domain, im unsure. We certainley have not wasted our time, the blog site was always going to happen anyway and is mainley for customers.the seo on this Is really an experment so im not that bothered if it doesnt rank high as we have the main site www.justrebeccaphotography.co
uk which i would never purchase odesk links for.also the. Info domain cost a grand total of £1.78 and i already have hosting.
The site took us a few hours of our time to complete. time will tell, i could always switch the site to a. Co.uk domain.

[LinkBuilder]

You're right, you havent wasted your time. SEO is very much trial and error. However your new site turns out, you will have learned something from it. From my own testing, .infos are not worth it. Yep they're cheap as chips to buy, but that's the reason why so many spammers use them . Good luck with your ventures. I like the design of your new site

[mtdmitchell]

Well thanks for the advise i will certainley look into it, i find it hard to believe that google would treat all .info domains as spam domains, i mean the amount of .com and other domain i have on my blocked lists far exceed that of .info domains. but i will look into it.

[Brendon]

.info domains aren't treated as spam automatically, but they have to be careful as they start with a "suspended sentence", which gets them punished harshly for trivial offences

[keano]

I'd re-iterate the point by Brendon about redesigning the homepage.

I looked at your site on a netbook running a 1024x600 resolution. Brendon mentioned that he had to scroll down to see content - I couldn't see your nav at all becasue of my screen resolution! Many people seeing your site using small devices or mobile devices won't know how to resize their browser view or bother to resize so they won't be able to navigate around your site at all.

The nav location is a very definate problem with the current site architecture in my opinion. I'd strongly advise that you look at altering the nav bar location.

Cheers.

[mtdmitchell]

I've been thinking of moving the nav bar to the top for a while now, just haven't got round to it, the site was designed for a min screen size of 1024x768, which should be the min really. But with the use of so many mobile phones and laptop screens screens being smaller it become a it of a pain.

Saying that im definatly going to turn the website - nav bar and text area upside down, that shoudl solve the problem, i will try and introduce some txt to the homepage as well.