Gettin' on Google

opendoors926 · Dec 9, 2008

I'm new to this forum and am starting a photography business of my own. I just finished my initial website, but haven't been able to google it yet. I know that there are a few ways to get a site on there, but I'd love to know if anyone has any good ways to get a site on google for free? Also, if you guys have any feedback on the site that would be great as well! It's:

www.opendoorsphotography.com

Any feedback, advice for new businesses, or suggestions on getting on google would be greatly appreciated!

abraxas · Dec 9, 2008

Here's a link;

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Search engine optimization (SEO) is quite a complex process. The one recommendation I would make to you is to change your title on your top page to something other than "Welcome."

Your site looks good though.

Good Luck.

Big Mike · Dec 10, 2008

Welcome to the forum.

I've moved your posts from the gallery to the 'shop talk' section.
SEE HERE

From HERE

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

As mentioned, SEO can be a complicated issue. It's easy to get listed but getting near the top of the list is another story. Either way, it does take some time before you start to show up.

opendoors926 · Dec 10, 2008

Thank you!!!!

Battou · Dec 10, 2008

Don't expect imeadiate results, it took a couple months for me to get results for Photo Lucidity, even then I get no image results.

NateWagner · Dec 10, 2008

yeah, it took me a few weeks to get on google. It'll start showing up eventually.

Now one of the difficulties I've had is with Live.com (msn's search engine) and yahoo.com . Neither of those seem to like my site at all.

andrew99 · Dec 10, 2008

Google will find your site, it may take a few days or a week. If there are more links to your site (such as in this thread), that will help. But don't spam, Google is pretty smart about identifying what is useful and what is spam. Also updating the site frequently seems to help. The site for my rock band got to be the number one result in Google without doing anything special.

I noticed something weird about your site -- I'm not sure what you used to create it, but all the text is not regular text. I can't select it with the mouse, it looks like it might be an image. This will be a problem for Google to read. And if Google can't read your website, it won't rank high in search results.

pixeldawg · Dec 10, 2008

Google looks at three major things- Meta Tags/data (Including the 3-4 sentence site description), Titles and Content of the site. In their swizzeling of sites, they track the usefulness of sites by their users. The more relevent the site is to users, the higher it will get ranked.

Another item that search engines look at is how often you update the site too. A site that is updated regularly will also carry a higher relevence because the data on the site is "newer". I would also suggest you consider placing a "bots" file into your site structure. Many of the bots that comb the internet,culling information for the various search engines prefer a bot page rather than going through the entire site. There is a lot of free information available online about this and how you should structure the page.

If you want to look at Meta data, go to:

http://www.elementssalon.biz and take a look. This is a web site that I made for the day spa that my wife and I own. There's a flash greeting, but you can click through it. Once you get a regular page up, you can go to "VIEW" on your web browser, and select "SOURCE". This is give you the source code for the web page you're viewing. Within that text, you'll see an html tag that has a "<" to start it and then the word "meta" (There should be two of them, actually... a description, which is what you read on the search engine description of the page and then a keyword section that places words that people use in search engines to look for your services...) then a closing ">". You can literally copy and paste mine if you'd like and simply change the wording. Make sure you place the tag in the same structural location (The head, I think...) so that it's valid and will be read.

On this site, we were, at one time, number 4 on the Google ranking for salons as a general search. We have fallen, I'm sure, because I haven't touched the site in months.

Anyway, hope this helps you out.