Few general questions

Hi there.

This morning I bought a new domain with the intention of branching out my photography business. I'm doing the usual things link link buildings, all manually, and updating my blog with fresh, decent content etc.

I just have a couple of questions:

1. I want to rank as a headshot photographer in my area, but I'm not sure how to approach the keywords. Would I be better off link building with the keyword "london headshots", or should I be just using "headshots"?

2, How many pages should I have on my website? At the moment there's only four. Is it a good idea who just create hundreds of pages and then link them all into each other, with unique content on each, keyword heavy?

My idea is to create tiny 1-pixel images in the bottom corner which visitors wouldn't ordinarily see, but a spider obviously would... Good or bad idea?


Thanks guys

You need to start with keyword research.

Go to Google Keyword External and search the desired keywords (check exact match / uncheck broad match)

Determine your skill set... ie. Can you actually rank for the term? If yes go for it, if no, keep looking.

I suggest using Traffic Travis to look at your competitors backlinks, etc.

Not sure what you're trying to accomplish with 1x1 pixel stuffing???

I don't think you need hundreds of pages for a local term like that. I'd prob. go between 5-20 pages of unique content.

Google typically doesn't like hidden links on pages.

But anyway, I'd work on making sure you have perfect on page SEO before you try and do any sort of link building, it will be much more effective that way.

As far as number of pages is concerned I'd go with a dedicated page per keyword. For example let's say your keyword is "Hicksville Nebraska Photography" You want to create the perfectly optimized page for "Hicksville Nebraska Photography" You do that by

1: URL - Something like com/hicksville-nebraska-photography.html

2: Title - The Best Hicksville Nebraska Photography

3: h1 tag - Hicksville Nebraska Photography

4: Meta - try to mention hicksville nebraska photography in both your meta keywords and description tags just for good measure

5: Body - throw hicksville nebraska photography in here a couple times, you can also do some other versions like "nebraska photography" or "Hicksville photography"

6: Backlinks - Just put "hicksville nebraska photography" in your anchor text to link to the page from your own website internally and from other websites too.

Do one page of that for each keyword and you should be set for most keywords.

Thanks for replies everyone.

As far as my on-page SEO goes, I think it's as good as I'm going to personally get it. I have everything explained. No flash, either, everything is HTML and CSS. The images all have alt tags with relevant keywords stuffed etc.. H1 tag with keyword in right at the top fo the page, repeated in the title and repeated again on the page and in the description and keyword text, along with being repeated on every other page on the site.

I just checked the external keyword tool, thanks for the link. I want to rank for "london headshots", and it says the competition is "high".

I know what that means, but could anyone explain what it REALLY means? Does it mean high in the sense that they just happen to rank there, or does it mean there's just no point in trying to compete with them?

Traffic Travis didn't throw up any errors on my site, save for a couple of missing alt tags, so I've fixed those and I think I'm good to go.

I'm in a position where is doesn't help me unless I rank for that exact term, so I guess I have my work cut out for me.

Can anyone else, given that I don't know what I'm really looking at, tell me the amount of work involved in ranking on the 1st page of UK Google with "london headshots"?

Thanks very much for the help so far, really appreciate it.

OK, my main competitor apparently has 125,000 backlinks, according to Traffic Travis. Would anyone mind telling me the most realistic method for competing with this?

Sorry , You Can't Send PM until You Have 15 Posts

Hi, please post here if you can, I don't have the ability to PM either.

Internal links are not that important unless your design is poor. Get a lot of external backlinks.

Consider adding fresh content such as blog posts about your profession vs. the number of pages on your website. Over time, these blog posts will become pages and add to the total page count. Inter linking these blog posts, I feel is important, as it promotes increased crawling and indexing of your website. Bookmarking these blog posts will also help.

For keywords, I would use both and build back links inter changing the two. The geo targeted keyword "london headshot photographer" would prob. take less time to rank for then the " headshot photographer" keyword. With a good backlink strategy, you could rank for "headshot photographer" over time. Best of luck!

DL777SEO: I have a blog right now what I'm updating daily with new decent articles about my business, is one article per day enough? I'm in that curious position here I just can't spam it, because this is my actual business at the same time. I hope one is enough.