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testbloke

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I now have website running and am trying the search engine tools (total newbie). In the website description I have dumped all the following tags ...
"photologue photologue.co.uk www.photologue.co.uk Scottish photography in print landscape city glasgow edinburgh river clyde forth blackhill airdrie salisburgh roughrigg nature zoo smoke art smokeart quality printing photography reasonable pricing prices"
I have also verified the website with google. Despite this, even googling specifically "photologue.co.uk" it comes up with nothing ...
WHY ???
 
EDIT....

i was jumping ahead of myself and didn't read your post correctly. i see what you mean, i have tried searching for your website in google and bing and it wont come up. sorry cant help with that.

but you could still use the below for your description.


HI,

I dont know too much about this, but this is what i know...Google doesn't use the meta tags for the search engine it uses actual content and text on the webpage. You will be able to set it so that you can have alternate text for images (so if images arent displayed it will replace it with this text) and what to do is have the alternate text as your website description, i you can find this alternate text menu make sure you change the text on the top image it shows in the list as this is what google will pick up first.

I dont know what software you are using for your website but i used iweb and there is a free SEO tool which does all this.

Hope this helps a bit, as i said i dont know alot about this.

Chris.
 
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thanks, I am using zenfolio it it has embedded tools suposedly to help with this. Have just spent three hours tagging pictures (for nothing ?) !
 
testbloke said:
thanks, I am using zenfolio it it has embedded tools suposedly to help with this. Have just spent three hours tagging pictures (for nothing ?) !
Click to expand...

Hopefully someone will be along soon to sort out why it isn't showing in Google.

I wouldnt say your tagging was for nothing, the tags will be useful for other things, some search engines may use them to pic up your website if someone searches for a tag you have used. (i think)
 
chrisgrieve said:
Hopefully someone will be along soon to sort out why it isn't showing in Google.

I wouldnt say your tagging was for nothing, the tags will be useful for other things, some search engines may use them to pic up your website if someone searches for a tag you have used. (i think)
Click to expand...

sorry, did not mean to sound deflated, just frustrated that I cannot work this out :bang:
 
razor777 said:
When did you create/publish the web site?
Click to expand...

site "created" a couple of days ago, tagging effort only in the past three hours. verified with google about two hours ago. Is this another "propogation" thing like the DNS changes ?
 
Ah right, you are looking about at least a week then. Yes google may have crawled your site but it does take a while for it to update its indexes - earliest about 5 days but about on average 2 weeks. If you have a prominent site (eg such as a forum with 1000's of hits and links) then it can be indexed the same day but this will not apply to 99% of websites.
 
razor777 said:
Ah right, you are looking about at least a week then. Yes google may have crawled your site but it does take a while for it to update its indexes - earliest about 5 days but about on average 2 weeks. If you have a prominent site (eg such as a forum with 1000's of hits and links) then it can be indexed the same day but this will not apply to 99% of websites.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Did not expect this web creation lark to have such long delays, suppose I can understand it but patience is definately not a virtue on my part !
 
that link was from 2009 so it may be better now, as said above, it may take a couple more days before it gets into google.
 
chrisgrieve said:
that link was from 2009 so it may be better now, as said above, it may take a couple more days before it gets into google.
Click to expand...

Doh, did not notice that either. Think my wine to sanity ratio is starting to tip the wrong way ...
time for bed :-)
 
testbloke said:
I now have website running and am trying the search engine tools (total newbie). In the website description I have dumped all the following tags ...
"photologue photologue.co.uk www.photologue.co.uk Scottish photography in print landscape city glasgow edinburgh river clyde forth blackhill airdrie salisburgh roughrigg nature zoo smoke art smokeart quality printing photography reasonable pricing prices"
I have also verified the website with google. Despite this, even googling specifically "photologue.co.uk" it comes up with nothing ...
WHY ???
Click to expand...

I work at Zenfolio and have a Zenfolio website for my photo business. I get great search results!

First, the Web Site Description is meant to be a descriptive paragraph about your business, this is not the place to enter keywords. The web site description will display on search results pages when your site is located as a brief description beneath the link.

We do our best to make sure that your pages get indexed by search engines but there is a lot you can do to help the process:

  • Provide a relevant web site description under Preferences>>Search Engine Tools. This should be a short description that includes your business name
  • Create friendly URLS for galleries and groups in your account. Instructions for this are listed here: http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/help/presenting-and-customizing-pages/creating-friendly-links-to-pages
  • Provide categories and keywords for all photos and galleries
  • Link to your site on external websites such as Forums, Blogs, etc. as much as possible
  • Assign a custom domain name
 
This thread is the #3 hit on Google in a search for photologue uk for me :)

A couple of observations

- Google have recently been tweaking their search engine significantly to deliver personalised results specific to users based on their previous browsing history. Combined with their 'instant' search feature introduced in the last few days, these have thrown the whole concept of Search Engine Optimisation into a bit of disarray as it becomes difficult to test effectively whether any particular strategy is working or not.

- Taking a look at the code for your page, the only content that appears in the body text is minimal, with what there is being somewhat generic ['guestbook', 'Photo Galleries'] apart from a quote from Ansel Adams. Getting words displayed on the page that are relevant to you and your market would be a big help here.

For example, if you're aiming for a local market, make sure that photographer, Airdrie and Lanarkshire are in amongst the words you use. If you're going for international commercial photography, then get those words in. Get your home page content right as a priority.

If meta tags make any difference at all these days, it is only to support what's indexable in the actual content a visitor sees.

- doing a specific search for a unique phrase that does appear on your home page ["Welcome to photologue"] gets no hits. This suggest your site has not yet been indexed by Google. Not a lot you can do or expect till that happens.

As a popular site, TP gets crawled regularly by Google, which is why it's showing up in the search I mentioned first.

Getting your name (with a link) around will help with this. Getting linked to by others is still a good thing for improving your search rankings.
 
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1. it takes time be patient
2. even if google lists your site what is it going to list it as? You have quotes from other photographers, and a handful of words describing what you do
No text = no context for the searches
3. Photography is over saturated and fiercely competitive. A great site inst enough, you need Offsite SEO too

owever, localy you are very lucky - if you do a google search for Glasgow photographer the photographer that comes in on P10 page 1 is here: www.monapics.com/ see this:http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.co...MkF?p=www.monapics.com/+&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp that indicates only a handful of in bound links is needed. to make an impact - My site needed 1700 in links before breaking onto page 1 for a reasonable local search
 
Hi,

If you search for Photologue on google now you appear as the 4th link down :thumbs: im sure a few more tweaks as mentioned above may help it even more.
 
Sorry for not replying sooner, I really did got to bed !

Everyone, many, many thanks for all the information above. This is great advice and I will put it in place as soon as I can.

This is all completely new to me (as you can tell) and although frustrating, still fascinating.

Again many thanks.
 
According to w3.org there are a lot of mark up errors on virtually every page.

While this may not affect Google (yet) it may affect how your site is viewed on different browsers across the net.

The other day I looked at another site on here and one of my browsers couldn't see the content on the pages probably due to the same problem.

As to the title - you need to make it different on every page and about 7-10 words long.

But you do need text on the page - perhaps a full description of every photograph, where it was taken etc.

All this helps with getting on to Google.

I would also suggest signing up to Google Analytics and using their tools to help you see how people are visiting your site.

Also putting up a sitemap for Google and Yahoo will also help to get you indexed.

This site:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Will create 4 sitemaps for you FREE which you can then load onto your website.

This makes it much easier for Search Engines to index your site as all the info they need is in one place.

As far as I remember Google needs the XML sitemap and Yahoo uses the Urllist sitemap and if you also load the HTML map on then you cover all bases.

You can also use Xenulink:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

to check your site for broken links.

These tools are FREE and all work well.

.
 
Petersmart, againmany thanks for the links, I will look into this.

As for the mark up errors, as this is hosted through zenfolio (template) I dont think there is much I can do other than draw there attention to it ?
Or can I manually fix the HTML ?
 
testbloke said:
Petersmart, againmany thanks for the links, I will look into this.

As for the mark up errors, as this is hosted through zenfolio (template) I dont think there is much I can do other than draw there attention to it ?
Or can I manually fix the HTML ?
Click to expand...

It's actually XHTML Strict - which does not have any latitude for errors.

It's rather odd that Zenfolio have put up templates which contain errors.

Unless you have access to the actual markup code and the means to upload it to your site there is nothing you can do apart from bring it to the attention of Zenfolio.

.
 
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petersmart said:
It's actually XHTML Strict - which does not have any latitude for errors.

It's rather odd that Zenfolio have put up templates which contain errors.

Unless you have access to the actual markup code and the means to upload it to your site there is nothing you can do apart from bring it to the attention of Zenfolio.

.
Click to expand...

Again, thanks. I am currently running a tweaked template, but only colours have been adjusted. Will try reverting to basic template then test to see if any better, otherwise alert zenfolio.
 
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