Looking at SEO

This morning I was looking at SEO for my photo website. First I was looking for a keyword tool, the sites I found via Google all seemed to be pay/subscription based ones.

Then I remembered that I had probably downloaded a keyword tool as part of one of those 'Give us your email address and you'll get access to 20 ebooks with a total value of $21,253' promotions that internet marketeers are so fond of using.

Looking through my ebooks, I found one called 'My Profitable Niche Revealed' by Chris Freville. While the guide is aimed at setting up a site with affiliate links, and getting all your traffic via google adwords, I still found it quite useful.

The guide suggests checking clickbank to see what products are being offered, and if there is a profitable niche there you can exploit. So I checked clickbank for 'photography', and there were about 50 results, though I didn't see any for macro photography. Most seemed to be something like 'Digital photography for beginners' or 'Make money from your digital camera'.

Unfortunately, I couldn't see how you can actually tell which products are selling well and which aren't.

Next the guide suggested using SpyFu to see what keywords you can use to advertise and what keywords your competitors are using. I didn't find this very useful, though maybe because I'm not interested in running ads at the moment.

The guide also suggested using the Google Keyword Tool, so I took a look at that, and found it quite useful. You can enter a keyword(s), and then it will give you a list of similar keywords and show the amount of searches for that keyword, along with advertiser competition for that keyword. So If you're interested in advertising, you can find keywords getting a decent amount of hits, but with little advertiser competition.

In my case, I'm not interested in advertising at the moment, so I just looked for the keywords getting a decent amount of hits so I can try and optimise my site for them.

Next I did a google search for 'SEO'. I remember a few years ago, a good way to get a high ranking on google was to put a bunch of links in the footer of your site, so I wanted to see what format the links should take to get a good weighting from Google. The third ranked site for 'SEO' in google was www.seoconsult.co.uk. Looking at their front page, they didn't have a bunch of links in the footer, however they did have very keyword rich text. I also noticed that their homepage contains tons of text (all keyword rich).

What they've done is within their homepage they include 5 tabbed sections, each tab contains quite a bit of text. The text of each tab is actually included in the homepage, they just use javascript to turn the divs containing each section into a tabbed format, so if you browse the page with javascript you don't get overloaded by the length of text.

I spent the rest of the morning in the garden taking photos, mainly of a caterpillar that McRad found on a geranium.

After lunch I went on Animal Crossing, then did some reading up on SEO. I thought this article Avoid the Mistakes New SEOs Make was quite good.

After dinner I watched a French film about a circus called 'Parade' with Moccle and L. I did a Japanese lesson, and then tried to do some Kanji cards with Moccle.

The weather was overcast most of today, though there was a bit of sun in the afternoon. It was overcast at sunset.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Mornflake Chocolate Oat parcel things; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on toast with iceberg lettuce; 2x plums; clementine; Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Lasagne; salad. Pudding was a Strawberry Muller Rice. Coffee.