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On-Page SEO for a blog?

by larryphoto
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey Everyone-
Been trying to learn the ins and outs of SEO for the past few weeks - just stumbled onto this forum. Wondering if you can clarify what Im sure is a dumb question..

I'm working on driving traffic to my website (lourceyphotoDOTcom) which is a WP-based blog. I'm writing articles and doing press releases.. I've even spent a few hours rounding up some backlinks. What I don't fully understand is whether or not I've done everything possible on the site itself.

I've seen people who stash a ton of keywords at the bottom of their main page- I'm assuming to help with ranking. Are my blog entry tags providing all my keyword support or should I have something else on my site.

If someone wiser than me could offer some input, I'd be most grateful!

Thanks,
Larry
#blog #onpage #seo
  • Profile picture of the author twmaffun
    I dont have time to check out your site, and i'm sure someone will, however since you are using wordpress you should install SEO plugins, and fill out the pages to match. You should also get your backlinks indexed if they have not naturally been indexed. Don't keyword stuff your pages, google doesnt like that kind of stuff.


    cheers mate.
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    • Profile picture of the author raviv
      Hi Larry,
      First off compliments on a visually beautiful site with a very elegant WP theme. It matches your creative talent as a photographer.

      The posts are very informative and original. You are doing lots of things right. Keep creating quality content and your site will grow in stature in time to come.

      The only points I would like to make are:
      1) You are a portrait photographer. I am not sure how much keyword research you have done. I am not a photography expert at all. You are the domain expert and know best. I am not sure if your posts address the search terms that users are targeting in the portrait photography field.

      2) The image above the fold on every page is too big. Maybe you can reduce it a bit so that the home page content (atleast the title of the first post shows up above the fold). It could be horrible from creativity point of view but it is useful to indicate that content runs down the page to a site visitor.

      3) The site has abundant images which is the key to a photography site as visuals are eye catching. But from search engines point of view, they cant understand a thing about it. So you must have alt tags with correct description of each image. This way the bots can understand what each image is about. This way your images can be listed on Google Image search and can rank well thus bringing in more visitors.

      4) Each post is very informative. I am wondering why you have not added tags which you can do when adding a new post in the WP admin interface. These tags should be representative of your post and it is good if they are included in the post content. They are useful in providing keyword love.

      5) On the blogroll, you can remove the Plugins and Wordpress Blog links as they are not really relevant to your site theme. When you link out, try to link to related photography sites (not direct competitors but more that are thematically related)

      6) As far as SEO goes, a site:lourceyphotography.com reflects lot of duplicate title tags for several pages. The title tag is the most powerful on page factor in SEO. You must have unique titles for each post/page on your site. (Screenshot attached showing the first four listings having the same title followed by Part X where X is the number that varies)

      7) You have a prominent RSS feed. You would be well off submitting your site links to RSS directories. Here on WF, a Warrior has started linklicious.me offering a free service for upto 50 URLs. You can try it.

      8) If you have Twitter and Facebook accounts, make sure that your blog feed is integrated with them. I am not sure about FB but for Twitter there are plugins like WP To Twitter. If correctly set up, every time you update your blog, the post is tweeted or FB wall is updated.

      9) You can have lens on Squidoo about portrait photography and a hub on Hubpages. You can link your blog RSS feed to these sites as well.

      10) Under categories, you have Fine Arts twice (but both are different URLs). I am not sure why it has been setup that way.

      In summary, this site truly reflects your passion you have for your field and it is passion that will convert to profits. Mere automation by adding plugins just for the sake of doing so, autoblogging and the like will never do justice to your passion.

      So saying, there are certain important plugins that are essential for a site. The best you can do is make it much more search engine friendly by adding some useful plugins like All In One SEO Pack. Other essential ones are Google XML Sitemaps, Google Analytics Plugin and a plugin to communicate with Twitter and Facebook.

      I do not want to go beyond this as your site is truly a work of art. Just making it a bit more search engine friendly will bring huge rewards to your hard work. Keep up the great work.

      Best
      Raviv
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  • Profile picture of the author OnlineMarketingSys
    Originally Posted by larryphoto View Post

    Hey Everyone-
    Been trying to learn the ins and outs of SEO for the past few weeks - just stumbled onto this forum. Wondering if you can clarify what Im sure is a dumb question..

    I'm working on driving traffic to my website (lourceyphotoDOTcom) which is a WP-based blog. I'm writing articles and doing press releases.. I've even spent a few hours rounding up some backlinks. What I don't fully understand is whether or not I've done everything possible on the site itself.

    I've seen people who stash a ton of keywords at the bottom of their main page- I'm assuming to help with ranking. Are my blog entry tags providing all my keyword support or should I have something else on my site.

    If someone wiser than me could offer some input, I'd be most grateful!

    Thanks,
    Larry
    Seo is broken down into two main parts.

    Part A: Your Onpage SEO- which is exactly what it sounds like. Meaning how well your physical site is optomised and SEOd

    Part B: Your offpage SEO- this is your backlinks, press releases, basically anything that links back to your sites and give you more authority and traffic.


    So briefly in terms of Onpage SEO:
    1. Check your site for browser errors. Preferably in Google Webmaster tools as well as a third party checker like The W3C Markup Validation Service . Currently your site has some errors that you should correct.

    2. When uploading pictures always label them so they apply to your site and in particular keywords your trying to target for. So your logo, you could change to lourcy photography.

    3. Avoid links out to other pages your getting nothing in return. This is sometimes referred to as PR bleeding/leaking. For example you have some plugin for blog directory, which I wonder if it even works or if you'll ever get any reciprocal links from. Yet you are bleeding page rank right there.

    4. Under the portfolio section, on the picture put the name of your company or better yet try to incorporate your keywords into them.

    5. Under your about us section. Make your posts or articles at least 400+ words or more, I am sure there is plenty you can talk about that your company does. Also be sure to include your main keyword 1-3% density.

    6. On your individual articles also follow the 400+ word count rule. The least you can really get away with is 350 words. Also be sure to check your keyword density of the words you are targetting.

    7. Create links to you main page for your target keywords and pages throughout the site.

    8. Use links to pages out sparingly, and if you do generally you want to attach the nofollow attribute. Again you are leaking PR juice.

    9. Use H1 and H2 tags where possible in your articles. And bold your keywords.

    10. Tag your posts. try to have 3-4 tags that are relevant to each post.

    11. Blogroll links, get rid of them unless absolutely necessary again leaking PR juice to site that probably do nothing for you or you have no relation to.

    Off site PR

    1. Don't blast away or put your links on site with 1000's of comments just because they tell you it's ok. This doesn't help you.

    2. You want to have good link diversity, not just coming from one site or domain.

    3. Try to find niche relevent high PR blogs, and see if you can write an article about photography or something if they agree to include your link. A lot of sites will agree to do it if you provide expert advice.

    4. Article directories also do work well, submit to the top tier ones. Ezinearticles,ect.

    5. If you want to rank high for some of these keywords focus on high PR relevent comments.

    6. Submit a press release, and pay the extra $60-70 to have it done by a top tier provider. There is a big difference between free and paid press releases. Also if you are not skilled in writing them (not many people are) find a skilled warrior on her and expect to pay something like $40-50 to have a professionally writting PR piece done.

    7. Book marking to your site can also help as well as submitting to directories. There are people that will submit to 1000 directories for like $20, just outsource it, its much cheaper and effective use of your time.

    8. Make sure your GP listing is properly SEOd. Meaning add the extra categories your targetting, get review site listing for your company,ect...

    9. After you hopefully made the changes and taken some time to get some high PR relevent backlinks re-evaluate where you are. And then make an informed decision if you want to explore other backlinking strategies.

    PS: Also take the time to review and study the SEO report on your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Abledragon
    Hi Larry,

    Here's an article on how to optimise on site SEO for a WordPress blog:

    SEO For WordPress Blogs | WealthyDragon

    Among other things it explains how to use Tags and Categories properly for optimal on site SEO.

    Cheers,

    Martin.
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    WealthyDragon - Earning My Living Online
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    • Profile picture of the author scott g
      Wow... I'm not even going to bother posting something and making myself look bad!

      Very impressive and detailed analysis raviv & OnlineMarketingSys!

      That's why these forums are NUMBA WON! :p Listen to everything they're telling you Larry!

      CHEERS!
      Signature
      scott g
      "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve."
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  • Profile picture of the author jones1982
    Originally Posted by larryphoto View Post

    Hey Everyone-
    Been trying to learn the ins and outs of SEO for the past few weeks - just stumbled onto this forum. Wondering if you can clarify what Im sure is a dumb question..

    I'm working on driving traffic to my website (lourceyphotoDOTcom) which is a WP-based blog. I'm writing articles and doing press releases.. I've even spent a few hours rounding up some backlinks. What I don't fully understand is whether or not I've done everything possible on the site itself.

    I've seen people who stash a ton of keywords at the bottom of their main page- I'm assuming to help with ranking. Are my blog entry tags providing all my keyword support or should I have something else on my site.

    If someone wiser than me could offer some input, I'd be most grateful!

    Thanks,
    Larry
    If you write some unique blog contents. then your site will come to search engine quickly. make your blog content relevant. article submission, blog commenting, social bookmarking, social networking, forum post etc is very helpful way to increase your blogsite backlinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author MrWonton
    I run a photo blog and gets most of my traffic from google images. In addition to the great posts above, I can't stress enough image optimization. This is what works for me:

    Save your image as: keyword.jpg.

    Put your keyword(s) in the alt and title tags.

    Manually upload your images with FTP, and save in a folder which contains your kws (ie: site.com/images/keywords/keywords.jpg)

    If you're using thumbnails, upload these as separate images, and link to your full sized images manually. This allows you to optimize the TNs separately, and then optimize the link to your full-sized image.

    The above may seem overkill, but my photos rank very well for some pretty competitive terms.

    Hope it helps
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    Drifting | Twitter
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  • Profile picture of the author larryphoto
    Holy smokes- can't thank you enough for all the info!
    Now in all honesty, I really only understand about 70% of what your are suggesting, but at least it gives me a place to start. It seems like the more I learn about all this, the more I realized how LITTLE I know!

    I'm using All-In-One SEO plugin - and thought I was tagging everything sufficiently, but it sounds like maybe I need to look into that a bit more.

    I'm printing off all the above ideas and going to start working down the list. Again, I can't THANK YOU enough for the detailed answers. Really way more than imagined I would get!

    Larry
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