Web Traffic Part 1: Why your web traffic sucks.

I’ve talked to a lot of photographers, and no matter how great a photographer, or person they are, there always seems to be one problem: getting and maintaining traffic to their website. Now I know that anyone can go the easy way, and buy advertising through google, but what if there was a way that you could do this all yourself, without having to buy ads with a low ROI(return on investment), or pay someone a ton of money to maybe get you traffic. There are a few simple steps that will drastically improve your Search Engine Ranking that I’ll be highlighting over the next few days.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about.

• Part 1: SEO – Why your web traffic sucks(The Bad News)
• Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)
• Part 3: Wordpress
• Part 4: Noah Photo Blogsites
• Part 5: Social Media and Networking.(How twitter and facebook can change your life)

I’m gonna make a few guesses here. 1: You have a website, but can’t seem to get people to stay very long if you can even get them to come at all. 2: You have a flash based website that looks beautiful, has large images, but kind of looks like everyone else’s website. 3: You have a free blog hosted by Blogger or Wordpress. 4: You’ve heard of SEO, but think you need to pay someone $99 a month to “get you to the front page”

Well if even one of these guesses fit you, I hope you get a lot out of what I’m about to tell you.

Here are the basics of SEO. Google, Yahoo, Bing, along with a few other search engines take text from your website and run it through a few different highly complex algorithms and basically assess the quality of your site, and the relevance to searches made on their websites. If you are a wedding photographer in Los Angeles for example, you would want your bride to go to a place like yahoo and type in “Wedding Photography in Los Angeles,” and hopefully, if you play your cards right, you’ll show up on the first page. Last time I checked there were thousands of photographers in L.A. so the likelihood of front page results is slim to none, especially if you know nothing about SEO… I want to steer you in the RIGHT direction, but first we need to make sure you aren’t making some of the most common errors. So here is a list of things that you are likely doing wrong for your SEO.

1:You have no readable text on your website: It’s lost inside the flash file, or some random xml file. To further the problem, spiders(the bots that search engines employ to scrape the web for information) don’t read flash, they only read text. So if all you have on your site is flash, you won’t be getting very far.

This is what the spiders read when they go to a beautiful flash site:

This site requires flash.
Please visit HERE to download the flash player.

2: The quality of the actual text in your site is no good: If you want people to find your site by searching “wedding photographer in Los Angeles” you don’t actually have any sentences that say specifically that. You might only have the word Los Angeles written on your website only once. Another problem is that you have plenty of images, but you don’t describe them. With SEO a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. No-one is going to find your website by searching Google Images for “contrasty black and white image with plenty of film grain.”

3: You are using a free blog: Now this seems like it would be great for SEO, but in all actuality, the only people that your “blogger” blog is benefiting are the people hosting your blog for you. This MIGHT increase web traffic, but all this is doing is bringing people to blogspot.com or wordpress.com. Not only that, but you are extremely limited as to what you can do with your account. Yes, you can spend $15 a year to edit the CSS, but what does that really get you? Do you know anything about CSS? (FYI: You can host wordpress on your already existing website for absolutely nothing.)

4: You are using old and antiquated SEO “tricks”, like Keywords, or Link Farms. STOP DOING THAT! Link farms will only hurt you. Search engines have caught onto this a LONG time ago. They’ve also gotten rid of any value for your Keywords, so don’t waste your time adding 500 keywords to your Meta tags… Also don’t repeat the keywords that you want too many times. for example, don’t have a footer that says “Los Angeles Wedding Photographer” 5 times in a row. Spiders can tell that you are trying to trick them, and they will penalize you.

5: You are using INVISIBLE text: Yes, you will see this all over the place, especially with flash websites. You make the font color the same as the background so that you can have a nice clean design, without people seeing that you are over-using your keywords…. This might seem like a good idea, but it will hurt you, and the search engines will penalize you.

6: Your URL is ugly: Does your URL look like http://www.yourname.com/&page=?243&category=?345&post=?24563? Not only does your traffic think it’s ugly, but so do the spiders. If you have a website made with PHP, this will more than likely happen, and it’s not good. Wordpress can be an exception though with it’s permalink structures.

7: You have spammed your URL: You sent a link out to all of your friends, and people in your network asking them to post the link on their site. Problem is, you sent the same text to everyone. The spiders don’t like this. They notice the trend that links to your site seem to have the same exact text surrounding the link. They then flag your site as a spam site. Along these lines, you don’t want to have more than 100 links on any given page. you don’t want to look like a link farm. Even if they are no-follow links, they can harm you. have a few high quality links to sites that you would put your name behind, like Camera Dojo, or Pictage. And the last part of this still fits this last point…. You need to make sure that the links on your site actually work. sites with bad links are also penalizes as a not high quality site.

So that’s it for today. Click the link below for what you can actually do to help your website grow traffic…. The GOOD news.

Part 2: SEO – 5 simple steps to improve search engine ranking(The Good News)

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