Re: Re: Lesson 12 – Online Port…

#18965
Brandon
Participant

@teacher wrote:

Beautiful website. Very well designed.

I do want to draw your attention to 1 technical detail…

Your url structure and meta tags could be optimized more effectively.

1. Your meta tags
Meta tags are how search engines find you. They are how your site is indexed in search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and Google. However, your meta title reads

Brandon Perron Photography – Portland metropolitn area, Oregon and Seattle metropolitin area, Washington Lifestyle and Wedding Photographer.

That is simply too long of a title, it’s a better description. What you need to do is mimic the character count of titles of similar websites that show up for your keywords. I know you’re trying to optimize for as many key-phrases as possible, but the trick is to use your main page for your main search term (or 2 search terms) and optimize internal “landing pages” for your “long tail”.

For example you may want to optimize your main page for “Portland wedding photographer” and an internal page for “Seattle wedding photographer”…. it’s important that you don’t make 1 page do the work that 5 internal pages should be doing.

2. Secondly, your site URL structure should be search engine friendly and optimized. When you optimize for your “long tail” you should choose URL’s that reflect your keywords.

For example, if you optimized an internal page for “Seattle wedding photographer” the desired URL would be:

http://www.brandonperron.com/seattle_wedding_photographer/

Right now your pages are dynamically generated and that won’t help you out too much.

I hope this helps! Like I said, the site is beautiful, but I want to ensure you’re getting as much organic traffic as possible, so while you’ve incorporated a great design, I want you to make the changes mentioned above for business optimization. I’ll get to your other assignments my afternoon tomorrow!

I am not concerned with the meta tags so much…SEO is on its way out anyways, or so the experts say…plus the site is flash so it is invisible to search engines anyways…the only thing that is not is the landing page… As for meta tages, it is shorter then any other meta tags then the photogrpahers who show up organically on the first page of search engines in my area…Again you reference the first page of the site to have more keywords, but I can not, like I said the site is flash and it is invisible to search engines…so that will not help me…So I understand how all this works, and if I wanted to set it up like you suggest, then I would have made it an HTML page, but I do not like HTML or XHTML sites.

I would also appreciate you looking at my 4 other assignments that I turned in…thanks very much.