vonnagy
have kiwi, will travel...
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2003
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- www.vonnagy.com
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Greetings tpf website owners,
I am putting this up as temporarily sticky, i'll remove this if no one expresses interest in this thread. I have been a web developer and search engine promoter for a few years now, so I figure i can provide a few pointers to people who are interested in promoting there website online.
I'll present a few useful links here and if you questions, you can respond to this thread.
Search Engine Optimising web site, whats it all about?
Optimising a website is a way of promoting your by ranking well for a certain search term. The key here is finding your search term you are trying promote. For instance, most photographers slather there names all over their website. Unless you name is Ansell Adams, chances are no one is going to look for your name when typing into search engines. If you are not famous, "Johnny Liecamanglers Photography" website is probably just going to collect dust on the world wide web.
Finding your niche
The key is to find your niche. Photographers have easier job than most because there interests can be easily categorised. For instance, you do black and white photo photography and you live in Tittibong Australia (actual place name
). You can optimise your site for Black and Photography Tittibong Australia.
One note, try going for niche categories instead general categories, such as "photos", "photography","digital photography". These are very hard nuts crack because of the competition. If you can crack them, maybe you should be writing this instead!
On useful tool is Wordtracker, it contains a database to words people type in search engines. You can see what people type into searchs by to going here:
Wordtracker Search Term Database
You can get an idea of how much traffic a search term that interest is getting, and build your site around it.
Building a search optimised site:
you can find alot of tutorials on how to do this, alot of theories etc. Basically (and thankfully) all three big search engines (The Googler, YAHOOOOO! and M$N) can be structured in the same way to be optmised.
You can do websearch for tutorials are try these ones:
search engine optimisation tutorial #1
Search Engine Marketing Tutorial #2
Link Pimpin' 8)
Yeppers linkies are quite important! However there are certain guidelines to follow which are mentioned in the tutorial above. A common useful practice is to include your keyword website link
General Guidelines:
1. Make sure the page that is linking to is relevent - for instance a link from "Ethel's Adult Lingerie Boutique" will probably not do much good if you promoting "Lawrence Kansas Photography". However, if you know of a camera shop, in Lawrence Kansas that has a website, that can be a pretty good link.
2. Exchanges links. These can be helpful - this is basically saying to one webmaster "I'll link to your website, if you link to mine". If you do this, make sure the site is relevent to your niche. Link exchanges are not as effective as one way links
3. One way links: This is getting a link to your website, without linking back. If its a relevent site, this is a very good thing indeed!
4. redirected links: These are pretty useless for search engine promotion, these are links, go to another website or a counter before they go to your website. A sample of this would be the photoforums links page, if you notice the link to matt needham's site does not directly go to his website but rather:
Redirects are used to measured how many times people have clicked on a link. These links are useless for optmisation as search engines are very of redirects as its a common spam technique (see below). However, if they are on highly visible page they can deliver alot of traffic to yourwebsite. You just have weigh what is more important for your website.
5. Directory links - These are online link resources divided into relevent categories. This is a choice way of getting one way links to your website. There is good soul from Australia named Dan who has taken the time to compile a list of search friendly directories in an excel spreadsheet (bless'im). Go here to download the Search Engine Friendly Directories List
Spammification
Just like the nasties you get in your inbox, search engines are prone to spammy sites trying to get to top of the listings. Here are some common search engine spam techniches to avoid:
* Keywords unrelated to site
* Redirects
* Keyword stuffing
* Mirror/duplicate content
* Tiny Text
* Doorway pages
* Link Farms
* Cloaking
* Keyword stacking
* Gibberish
* Hidden text
* Domain Spam
* Hidden links
* Mini/micro-sites
* Page Swapping (bait & switch)
* Typo spam and cyber squatting
Many of the above terms may be new to you, i encourage you to look them up on the net if you are not sure what they mean. You can read more about them in this article: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3483601
Paid Advertising
i'll let you in a lil secret, work! Those are the paid advertisements that appear on the side of google, or on top of Yahoo. The are great way to supplement traffic to your website. It can take a bit of practice to get your formulas right, but don't be turned off of using google adwords or yahoo overturejust because yer a cheap bast*rd. You will spend a HELL of alot less on this medium than print advertising and yield better results. Trust on this.
Email!
Email marketing for your website is one you can drive good traffic to your website and promote your website. Here's another secret: You as a photographer have a huge advantage over all other folks sending out emails - why?? Because you can provide visual content!
I've sent several email campaigns for different marketing companies and I thought email marketing really blow until I did work for an artist. We made a simple email with some art samples linked to his website. Because photographs were used to attract the users attention and they didn't have to read a bloody thing - the response was up to 500% greater than plain text emails i've sent.
Oh.. please use your common sense, friends. Don't Spam. You should have everyone's permission before you email.
Measuring Stats
You'll never how good your website is doing if you don't measure your website traffic. The main things I measure are the following;
* total vistors
* unique visitors
* search engines + keywords
* webtraffic from other sites
* direct webtraffic (bookmarks or typing in directly)
Usually most hosting companies can offer free stats programs such as AWstats which analyses log files to give the above information.
A fantastic open source analyis tool is phpMyVisites, which requires a piece of jjavascript to be put on each page. It was developed by a french student and I highly recommend it. Click here to go to the open source website statistics
There is alot to web analytics that is covered here, but if you have questions just post them here and I will attempt to answer them here.
Hosting:
I have used over 20 hosting companies when i was a web developer. Most have been really expensive, poor quality and quite frankly sucked. When I look for a hosting I look for the following:
1. linux servers
2. apache server with MOD REWRITE support (more about this later)
3. PHP/Perl Support
4. shared SSL (for secure connections)
5. CPanel - (this is a web management console, makes webmastering easy!)
All the above are musts and non negotiable. There are three webhosting companies which do all the above and offer great prices and superb service which i recommend.
They are:
SiteCity Webhosting This by far is the best hosting company for the price $1.95/USD a month for cpanel hosting. Based in Illinois, the support is excellent for the price I pay. I give them alot of business, and with good reason.
Aventure Webhosting is a Belfast based webhosting company who also are a fantastic to work with. The support is outstanding. I typically use the $3.75/USD a month webhosting.
Monster Hosting Canada kicks butt too. These folks provide good service for the coin you pay, hosting starts at
Please note, these companies didn't pay me for these kinds. I recommend them because they earned it.
I am putting this up as temporarily sticky, i'll remove this if no one expresses interest in this thread. I have been a web developer and search engine promoter for a few years now, so I figure i can provide a few pointers to people who are interested in promoting there website online.
I'll present a few useful links here and if you questions, you can respond to this thread.
Search Engine Optimising web site, whats it all about?
Optimising a website is a way of promoting your by ranking well for a certain search term. The key here is finding your search term you are trying promote. For instance, most photographers slather there names all over their website. Unless you name is Ansell Adams, chances are no one is going to look for your name when typing into search engines. If you are not famous, "Johnny Liecamanglers Photography" website is probably just going to collect dust on the world wide web.
Finding your niche
The key is to find your niche. Photographers have easier job than most because there interests can be easily categorised. For instance, you do black and white photo photography and you live in Tittibong Australia (actual place name
). You can optimise your site for Black and Photography Tittibong Australia. One note, try going for niche categories instead general categories, such as "photos", "photography","digital photography". These are very hard nuts crack because of the competition. If you can crack them, maybe you should be writing this instead!
On useful tool is Wordtracker, it contains a database to words people type in search engines. You can see what people type into searchs by to going here:
Wordtracker Search Term Database
You can get an idea of how much traffic a search term that interest is getting, and build your site around it.
Building a search optimised site:
you can find alot of tutorials on how to do this, alot of theories etc. Basically (and thankfully) all three big search engines (The Googler, YAHOOOOO! and M$N) can be structured in the same way to be optmised.
You can do websearch for tutorials are try these ones:
search engine optimisation tutorial #1
Search Engine Marketing Tutorial #2
Link Pimpin' 8)
Yeppers linkies are quite important! However there are certain guidelines to follow which are mentioned in the tutorial above. A common useful practice is to include your keyword website link
Code:
<a href="http://www.thephotoforum.com">Photo Forum: An online photography community</a>General Guidelines:
1. Make sure the page that is linking to is relevent - for instance a link from "Ethel's Adult Lingerie Boutique" will probably not do much good if you promoting "Lawrence Kansas Photography". However, if you know of a camera shop, in Lawrence Kansas that has a website, that can be a pretty good link.
2. Exchanges links. These can be helpful - this is basically saying to one webmaster "I'll link to your website, if you link to mine". If you do this, make sure the site is relevent to your niche. Link exchanges are not as effective as one way links
3. One way links: This is getting a link to your website, without linking back. If its a relevent site, this is a very good thing indeed!
4. redirected links: These are pretty useless for search engine promotion, these are links, go to another website or a counter before they go to your website. A sample of this would be the photoforums links page, if you notice the link to matt needham's site does not directly go to his website but rather:
Code:
http://www.thephotoforum.com/links.php?29Redirects are used to measured how many times people have clicked on a link. These links are useless for optmisation as search engines are very of redirects as its a common spam technique (see below). However, if they are on highly visible page they can deliver alot of traffic to yourwebsite. You just have weigh what is more important for your website.
5. Directory links - These are online link resources divided into relevent categories. This is a choice way of getting one way links to your website. There is good soul from Australia named Dan who has taken the time to compile a list of search friendly directories in an excel spreadsheet (bless'im). Go here to download the Search Engine Friendly Directories List
Spammification
Just like the nasties you get in your inbox, search engines are prone to spammy sites trying to get to top of the listings. Here are some common search engine spam techniches to avoid:
* Keywords unrelated to site
* Redirects
* Keyword stuffing
* Mirror/duplicate content
* Tiny Text
* Doorway pages
* Link Farms
* Cloaking
* Keyword stacking
* Gibberish
* Hidden text
* Domain Spam
* Hidden links
* Mini/micro-sites
* Page Swapping (bait & switch)
* Typo spam and cyber squatting
Many of the above terms may be new to you, i encourage you to look them up on the net if you are not sure what they mean. You can read more about them in this article: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3483601
Paid Advertising
i'll let you in a lil secret, work! Those are the paid advertisements that appear on the side of google, or on top of Yahoo. The are great way to supplement traffic to your website. It can take a bit of practice to get your formulas right, but don't be turned off of using google adwords or yahoo overturejust because yer a cheap bast*rd. You will spend a HELL of alot less on this medium than print advertising and yield better results. Trust on this.
Email!
Email marketing for your website is one you can drive good traffic to your website and promote your website. Here's another secret: You as a photographer have a huge advantage over all other folks sending out emails - why?? Because you can provide visual content!
I've sent several email campaigns for different marketing companies and I thought email marketing really blow until I did work for an artist. We made a simple email with some art samples linked to his website. Because photographs were used to attract the users attention and they didn't have to read a bloody thing - the response was up to 500% greater than plain text emails i've sent.
Oh.. please use your common sense, friends. Don't Spam. You should have everyone's permission before you email.
Measuring Stats
You'll never how good your website is doing if you don't measure your website traffic. The main things I measure are the following;
* total vistors
* unique visitors
* search engines + keywords
* webtraffic from other sites
* direct webtraffic (bookmarks or typing in directly)
Usually most hosting companies can offer free stats programs such as AWstats which analyses log files to give the above information.
A fantastic open source analyis tool is phpMyVisites, which requires a piece of jjavascript to be put on each page. It was developed by a french student and I highly recommend it. Click here to go to the open source website statistics
There is alot to web analytics that is covered here, but if you have questions just post them here and I will attempt to answer them here.
Hosting:
I have used over 20 hosting companies when i was a web developer. Most have been really expensive, poor quality and quite frankly sucked. When I look for a hosting I look for the following:
1. linux servers
2. apache server with MOD REWRITE support (more about this later)
3. PHP/Perl Support
4. shared SSL (for secure connections)
5. CPanel - (this is a web management console, makes webmastering easy!)
All the above are musts and non negotiable. There are three webhosting companies which do all the above and offer great prices and superb service which i recommend.
They are:
SiteCity Webhosting This by far is the best hosting company for the price $1.95/USD a month for cpanel hosting. Based in Illinois, the support is excellent for the price I pay. I give them alot of business, and with good reason.
Aventure Webhosting is a Belfast based webhosting company who also are a fantastic to work with. The support is outstanding. I typically use the $3.75/USD a month webhosting.
Monster Hosting Canada kicks butt too. These folks provide good service for the coin you pay, hosting starts at
Please note, these companies didn't pay me for these kinds. I recommend them because they earned it.
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