I have been reading the SEO101 thread and Nacho said that the Golden rule is not too over optimise.

I have applied a few things that I have learnt over the last few months and am now concerned I may have over optimised some of my pages.

Would anyone deem this page to be over optimised?

www(dot)africapic.com/elephant-pictures-7219.html

What are your thoughts?

At quick glance, No. The page is actually pretty empty IMO. I would start adding some content to the page. I would also change your breadcrumb navigation to better suit your targeted keywords. Internal links are just as important as external links

The breadcrumb links are nofollowed...does that help?

does the adsense generate any actual revenue. If your truly trying to sell images as a business, I think the adsense steals credibility.

I agree too that you need more text.... something at the very least of: "this photo of a charging adolescant male bull elephant was taken in the katahungi(made up) preserve in south kenya...yada yada

You want the engines to follow the links do you not? Why are you using nofollow?

The breadcrumb links are nofollowed...does that help?
Huh? Why the heck are you tagging internal links nofollow? If it's an effort to sculpt PageRank, I hate to say it, but as pretty much of a novice, nofollow has no business being in your SEO toolbox.

With all of the javascript in you main nav bar and all of the other links you've nofollowed I'm very unsure if the site is completely spiderable or, if it is, spiderable in such a way that the SEs will see the actual site structure.

And why nofollow your About Us, Rights, Contact pages and (arrgh!) your Sitemap? These are important pages, in fact, your about us is the only page with enough text for a spider to feed on.

It's time to get back to basics. Get rid of all nofollows except for those leading to the search and private areas. Get rid of the non-spiderable js rollovers in the main nav. If you want to keep the effect search around for SE friendly CSS rollovers.

Oh, and really, be sure to get rid of all of these:

<img src="images/space.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="Africa Pictures - Wildlife Stock Photography" />

If you're ever subject to a hand check those will have you dinged out of the SEs in a heartbeat.

And yeah, I'm a bit grumpy and blunt today. Can't seem to come up with diplomatic ways to say anything. ;-)

lol I think that's a fist Jimbeetle :)

Just to add . . .

Have you checked your site with a text only browser such as lynx?

Pics are nice, but content that Google can actually read is better, I think they are trying to say... :)
... And it looks like you're trying too hard with the no-follows and such. It looks like if you just added content to this page - in the form of some good paragraphs, you'd go a long way. Use good descriptors to act as keywords, and you'll do yourself a big favor, not to mention if you write something nice there, it is probably more likely to pull in a prospective buyer as well. Think of most online catalogs that are well-made, I personally like a small blurb on the product. This is a great place for smart key-wording in this fashion. Throw in the smart us of a Heading tag over that, and you'll probably help this page a bunch... my 2 cents :)

And yeah, I'm a bit grumpy and blunt today. Can't seem to come up with diplomatic ways to say anything. ;-)

Most appreciated! :-) You can all be as grumpy as you want as long as your advice is sound! :-) (as you are all far more experienced I just listen and learn - you guys must laugh at my mistakes, many are so simple) I really appreciate your honesty.

It appears that I need to make some changes. This is what I have done so far, and will be doing more.

1) removing BAD alt tags.
<img src="images/space.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="Africa Pictures - Wildlife Stock Photography" />
all those references are removed - they were never there before, but WEB CEO advised that I needed them, so I put them in - after my WEB CEO compliance, a lot of pages didn't get cached (this could be one reason :-)).

2) My next area to sort out is the nofollow.
(As you can see, I still have a lot to learn about SEO! - my understanding is that you only allow links to your key pages)
You want the engines to follow the links do you not? Why are you using nofollow?
I have a homepage and five different landing pages. I want my pagerank to flow to the homepage and the landing pages. All pages point to the homepage (bottom right link - called "Wildlife Pictures" and if relevant a page points to landing page (i.e. an elephant page points to the elephant pictures landing page [bottom left])

With regard to spidering the site this is my reasoning.
For each dynamic and ugly URL there is a static page which we display to Google (the database code is locked and I can't get in a modrewrite there), we only allow Google to see these static pages. The spider arrives at the homepage. It can spider to all the landing pages and the sitemap. The sitemap, has a few thousand static URL pages which it spiders. When on a static page, the spider returns to the homepage and the specific landing page.


Do I want to use some of my pagerank (which isn't much) to flow to the "contact us" and "about us"? Surely, I want it just to see the homepage and landing page and individual photo pages?

Should I drop some more nofollows? Which ones and why?

pagerank- take it where you can get it.

don't focus on it too much, google seems hell bent on doing away with it.

In our e-commerce site nearly 40% of visitors stop by at our about us page on the way to the purchase. Even with amazon and ebay a lot of people are still wary of online commerce and want to "trust" a site before they engage in a transaction.

does the adsense generate any actual revenue. If your truly trying to sell images as a business, I think the adsense steals credibility.

I agree too that you need more text.... something at the very least of: "this photo of a charging adolescant male bull elephant was taken in the katahungi(made up) preserve in south kenya...yada yada

If site's primary goal to get you customers or to get customers for affiliate program, then adsense isn't good. If site's content isn't targeted for above things, then adsense is probably best option to earn $.

I'll sell a product over adsense anytime...sure their are some shoemoneys out there but for every shoe there's a couple hundred thousand that haven't even earned enough to warrant a check printed.