SEO Software

[Brian Vuillemenot]

I'm looking into software to optimize my photography website for the search engines, and came across a program called Internet Business Promoter (IBP). It loooks like it may be helpful, although it doesn't really do anything you couldn't do without it; it just makes things much simpler and more efficient. Has anyone used this or other programs like it, and have any feedback? Thanks!

[roteague]

Brian, I don't know this particular software. However, most of the all do the same things, in essence. Keep in mind that search engines really only work on text, photographic websites are hard to optimize for them. There are a number of things that you can do, without resorting to this software. Looking at your website, which looks pretty good, a couple of things you can try (at a minimum) are: change the titles of your pages to be a bit more descriptive ("Images of Enchantment, Southern Wetlands, the photography of Brian Vuillemenot"), good captioning of your images (you already do this).

[kjsphotography]

Also make use of the ALT tag for your images. The search engine will also index off the text in the image tag and do not forget to add a good descriptive title. That will also help you get placed on the search engines.

[QT Luong]

Don't know about that one, but if I remember there was a product called "webposition gold" or something like that, which use has been shown to be detrimental, even resulting in the SEO's worst nightmare, being banned from Google.

[Code3TJ]

I wouldn't bother spending much if anything on software. There are many free resources available on the internet which will do the exact same thing as some of these programs. The first thing I'd recommend is to create a site index - basically a simple html page which lists every page on your site. Something like this:

<a href="http://www.imagesofenchantment.com/webctgalleries.html">Galleries</a><br>
<a href="http://www.imagesofenchantment.com/webctpan.html">Panoramic
Galleries</a><br>
<a href="http://www.imagesofenchantment.com/webctbisti.html">Bisti
Badlands</a><br>
etc
You don't have to make it fancy, but you also don't want it to look horrible in case somebody actually stumbles across it. Have a link to the site index from your main page. Your goal is to create something for the search engine spiders to easily find each page on your site.

Next up, as was mentioned earlier, you want to use distinct titles and meta tags for each page. The title is easy and come up with a good description for each page. I'd try to include the name of your website on each page. Something like "Images of Enchantment :: Sierra Nevada Photographs"
And then use a description like this:

Brian Vuillemenot's Images of Enchantment, photographs from the Sierra Nevada

For that particular gallery, you'd want to use keywords that are appropriate: Bodie, bristlecone, Mount Whitney, photographs, etc.

So meta tags will look something like this:


<title>Images of Enchantment :: Sierra Nevada Photographs</title>
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="description"
content="Brian Vuillemenot's Images of Enchantment, photographs from the Sierra Nevada">
<meta name="keywords"
content="images,photographs,mount whitney,bodie,galleries,bristlecone,enchantment,nevada,sierra">


As was mentioned, include ALT tags for your images including your thumbnails. Just a brief relevant description for each image. Once you've done all of that, save your page and if you want a cheap (free) and easy way to clean it up, you can use http://www.yook.de/webmaster/meta_gen/

The "robots" tag will tell the spiders to follow your links.

Also, as a suggestion, I'd probably include a short little description under each of your thumbnails - it'll help with your keywords and give your pages more content.

After you'd done all of that, you can use a spider simulator like http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/ to get a general idea of what the spiders are going to see when they look at your site.

Just some quick ideas - let me know if you have any questions or if I've confused you more. And some nice photos, I'm heading home to Taos to visit family next week. ;)

[Brian Vuillemenot]

Thanks, Code3TJ. Have a nice holiday in Toas!