Google Ranking for Food Photography

[Shoot The Moon]

Hi everyone!

Our company specialises in food photography, as well as designing packaging and doing copywriting for clients. Unfortunately, at present our site doesn't rank too well for our chosen keywords, which happen to be "food photography" and "packaging design". Does anyone have any tips to improve the ranking for these keywords?

[QT Luong]

You can try to participate in discussion forums that are marginally related to your activity. Some of those forums allow you by courtesy to include a link into your signature, which may help with your search engine ranking if you include your keywords as text in your link. The advantage of this approach is that it is free. However, if a moderator determines that your participation is not genuine (for instance because you never posted anything on the main topic of the forum), he may delete your posts and ban you.

Overall, more guaranteed results by investing money in a paid search result program.

[cyrus]

Well you can start with keyword density. I counted only 3 instances in which "food" was mentioned on your home page - and only 1 was in the form of visible text (text in meta tags and alt tags don't seem to count - though they don't hurt either)

You can compare your site's keyword density versus that of the #1 ranking site with this tool: http://www.keyworddensity.com

Also, use of frames certainly doesn't help.

The content on this page at least should not be framed, and include a more friendly food-related file name instead of "design_02_f.html"

http://www.shoot-the-moon.co.uk/desig_02_f.html

[Photomax]

I think part of the problem is your site. Cyrus has some good points already. I would redo your site. Get rid of the splash page. Get rid of the frames and tables. Create a home page with web standards design with a good title, H1 headline and descriptive paragraph. Remove ALL of page structure from the code and use 100% CSS instead. Add well thought out meta tags. Submit your site to the major search engines and then be patient. This takes time.

Cheers,

Max

www.balmainphotography.com

[robc]

Look to see what those who come top for your search phrases have done and then do it better.

[Frank Petronio]

What Max said. New style design and code, with real writing about real things, not just clever keyword spam.

[Shoot The Moon]

Well you can start with keyword density. I counted only 3 instances in which "food" was mentioned on your home page - and only 1 was in the form of visible text (text in meta tags and alt tags don't seem to count - though they don't hurt either)

You can compare your site's keyword density versus that of the #1 ranking site with this tool: http://www.keyworddensity.com

Also, use of frames certainly doesn't help.

The content on this page at least should not be framed, and include a more friendly food-related file name instead of "design_02_f.html"

http://www.shoot-the-moon.co.uk/desig_02_f.html

Hi cyrus! Both of those issues are things I'm trying to fix now thanks to you pointing them out. The splash screen has gone and I'm trying to get rid of the frames too. That'll teach me not to hire a web designer in future. I'm doing half of the hard work myself!

[robc]

That'll teach me not to hire a web designer in future.

LOL

[cyrus]

The problem isn't all the designer's fault. There is a tradeoff between making lovely looking sites, and making sites that rank high on search engines. Sites made entirely in flash, for example, can be fantastic (though most suck) but they won't rank as high as a a simple barebones html+css site. I suppose the tradeoff is due to the pro-text bias that exists in the ranking algorithms of search engines. This is probably a particular issue for photography-related sites since they tend to be image-heavy and text-light.

So at some point any website owner has to confront the question: do I want a site that ranks high, or a site that looks good. That said, there are still a lot of things that can be done to a site to improve its ranking without changing its looks.

[Frank Petronio]

Oh Cyrus, making a lovely site with intelligent words and valid code and easy accessibility and simplicity CAN be done. When you frame it as an "either or" statement then you are settling for less than you should.

[cyrus]

OK let me be clearer: As you progress along the lovliness curve, at some point the search-engine friendliness, accessibility and simplicity start to fall off. Once you have reached that point of lovliness, then the tradeoff starts to matter and decisions have to be made.

But luckily, that point is way, way far into the lovliness axis, where most sites don't venture (nor really need to venture IMHO.)

[Frank Petronio]

Well at the far reaches of the lovliness curve it would simply be a splash page of a huge jpg of Uma Thurman (or _______) reclining in loose, silk garments.

That "lovliness curve" analogy is great, I should bring you along on my pitches.

[Photomax]

The first real paragraph is very important. This paragraph, like the H1 heading, should be very direct and descriptive: it should contain all the words that search engines will latch onto. Who you are, where you are and what you do etc. Avoid search engine misfire fluff like: " Welcome to our new site. Enjoy, please tour our galleries and contact us with any questions..." These kinds of lines will yield 0% search engine results.

Having these key headlines and paragraphs way up top is important too. Removing all the font tags, tables and layout structure code into a CCS file moves the headline and intro up to the top of the code where google and other search spiders will find them more easily.

Its interesting to take a look at the code behind photographer's and other content websites. Sites that have frames and tables have tons of code that is hard to read. Checking the code of a clean CSS site reveals shorter more direct code. Helpful comments can explain what the <divs> are and where they begin and end etc. It is also easier to spot the real content which is very helpful when it comes to making changes....

Max