web presence

Web Presence

http://photographyblogsites.com



Not Just a Website

• Website

• Blog

• Social Networks

• Incoming links

• Articles / Mentions




Own Your Web Presence

• not myname.wordpress.com

• not myname.blogspot.com

• myname.com

• twitter.com/myname

• facebook.com/myname




Consistent Voice

Branded / Consistent Look

• Logo

• Site Design

Branded / Consistent Message

• Site Content

• Social Networks

• Forums

• Twitter / Facebook




Get Found

• How do you want to be found?

• I should be found when people search for _______________.




Defining Your Keywords

• Be specific.

• Use locations.

• Use “Long Tail” terms.

• Long Tail definition on Wikipedia


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail



Long Tail Terms

• photography - too general

• portrait photography - a little better

• los angeles portrait photography - location

• Beverly Hills Hilton wedding reception - venue

• Portrait photography prices - anything related, very specific




Keyword Tool

• Google Keyword Tool

• Use to generate ideas

• Start with terms you know

• Shows the number of searches for a term per month.


https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal



Types of SEO / Traffic Building

• On-Page ( What you do to the site itself - content, etc. )

• Incoming Links

• Traffic

• Page Rank




Getting Keywords into Your Site

• Search engines see text.

• All sites are text (HTML) on some level.

• But how much text is being seen?




Text

What You See

What Search Engines See

In your browser,click View->Source




HTML Basics

• HyperText Markup Language

• Structured elements called tags

• Tags have content

• Tags have attributes




Tags

• Start and end in brackets• <a></a>• <p></p>• Some are self contained• <br/>




Content

• Between brackets - the content• <p>This is a paragraph.</p>• <a>This is a link</a>




Attributes

• Attributes describe the tag• Are placed inside opening bracket• <p id=”attribute”>text</p>• <a href=”http://site.com”>Link</a>




“Alt” Attributes

• <img src=”http://mysite.com/image.jpg” />• <img src=”http://mysite.com/image.jpg”

alt=”Some Text That Describes Picture”/>


http://mysite.com/image.jpg

http://mysite.com/image.jpg



Meta Tags

• Describe the entire page / site

• Tell search engines what the page is about.

• Three types of Meta Tags:

• Title

• Description

• Keywords




Title




Description




Keywords

• Was the first method of telling search engines about a page.

• Lead to ‘keyword stuffing’.

• Now ignored by Google.

• Need to find other ways to get those keywords into the site.




Using Your Keywords

• The content itself.• Proper use of heading tags• <H1>Page Title</H1>• Ideally only one per page• <H2>Sub Heading</H2>• Can have more of these• Alt Attributes for Images




Your Site is For People

• Keep it readable

• Keep it informative

• Don’t cram as a many keywords as you can.




Incoming Traffic

• Sites with lots of traffic rank well

• Source doesn’t matter

• Famous / well-known person

• Ads

• Lots of Twitter followers / Facebook friends

• Search results




Building Traffic Cheaply

• Rank better in search results

• Be active in social networks

• Leave comments on blogs / sites

• Write guest posts on more popular sites

• Always link to your site




Page Rank• A number assigned to every page by

Google from 1-10.

• Measure of the page’s authority and quality.

• Ranks all of the factors - on page content, incoming links, traffic, etc.

• Exponential -

• 2 is 10 times better than 1

• 3 is 10 times better than 2




Why Page Rank is Important

• Links from high page rank sites are worth more.

• Sites with high page rank show up higher in search results.




You should (almost) forget Page Rank

• Only really useful in determining quality of incoming links.

• No real equation to figure it out.

• Look at the factors that make it up - traffic, quality of site, etc.

• Other than spammy links or paid links, basically all link are good. Just get them all.




Make Links More Powerful

• Meaningful Anchor text

• <a href=”http://site.com”>Anchor Text</a>

• Meaningful Title Attributes

• <a href=”” title=”More info about link”>

• Bad - Click Here

• Good - Visit my Photography Site




Keep Search Engines on Your Site

• You can block search engines from following links.

• Useful when linking out, especially to large sites - a link to your Twitter or Facebook page.

• By block the search engines, you keep them crawling your own site.




External Nofollow

• Within the link, use the ‘rel’ attribute

• rel=”external nofollow”

• <a href=”http://twitter.com/”>Link</a>

• <a href=”http://twitter.com/” rel=”external nofollow”>Link</a>


http://twitter.com

http://twitter.com

http://twitter.com

http://twitter.com



Link Within Your Own Site

• Reference old posts

• Link to other similar content

• Use strong Anchor Text for those links




Optimizing Images

• Use ALT attributes on all images

• Give the images themselves meaningful names




Which one is a picture of a cat?

• <img src=”http://mysite.com/image001.jpg”

• <img src=”http://mysite.com/cat.jpg” alt=”This is my cat, Snowball” />


http://mysite.com/image001.jpg

http://mysite.com/image001.jpg

http://mysite.com/cat.jpg

http://mysite.com/cat.jpg



Flash

• Flash hides most content

• Might use a ‘mirror’ html site to be readable.

• Can be setup to display text to search engines.

• Hides image info though - Alt Attributes, image names, etc.




Better Flash

• separate pages - not one flash site

• text urls

• Think of flash as an image or movie

• It should be something embedded within the page. Not the whole site itself.




WordPress

• More than just a blog

• Can be any type of site

• According to Google, it is THE best platform for SEO Article & Video

• Takes care of 80-90% of everything SEO.

• With a couple plugins, it does the rest.


http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/seo/googles-matt-cutts-wordpress-the-best-blogging-platform-for-seo/

http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/seo/googles-matt-cutts-wordpress-the-best-blogging-platform-for-seo/



WordPress Settings

• By default URLs looks like this ‘/?p=234’

• Should be words, using the post titles

• Change your permalinks

• Settings->Permalinks

• Select custom

• Use month/day structure




WordPress Plugins

• All In One SEO Pack

• Google XML Sitemaps

• SEO Friendly Images

• SEO Image Galleries

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin




Which WordPress?

• Not WordPress.com

• Download from WordPress.org

• Install on your own hosting account.

• With Cpanel access, look for One-Click installs

• ‘Fantastico’ or ‘Simple Scripts’




Analyzing Your Site

• Google - site:domain.com

• Results are all the pages Google has crawled on your site

• Google - links:domain.com

• Results are pages that link to your site.

• http://www.prchecker.info/

• Find out the page rank of any site.http://photographyblogsites.com

http://www.prchecker.info

http://www.prchecker.info



Monitor Your Site

• Google Webmaster tools

• Also use this to submit your site to Google

• Google Analytics

• Track visitors, keywords they found you with, etc.




Marty Thornley

http://martythornley.com

[email protected]




mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]



web presence

Technology

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