Optimising a Websites Structure.

[africapic]

Hi Everybody

I have joined this forum fairly recently and have found some really good advice. So this is a thumbs up to all the good advice and thoughts that has been offered so far. Thanks everyone.

It is so good to know that there are such helpful people around. I have spent far too long hitting my own head against the wall! Anyways, it's time to work smartly now and get help from the gurus!

These are my three questions:
1) How can the overall site structure be improved?
2) How can I improve the layout of the landing pages to be better optimised?
www(dot)africapic.com/pictures_of_lions.html
3) How can I improve the individual image pages optimisisation for long tail keywords? www(dot)africapic.com/lion-drinking-pictures-5489.html

Here is a bit of an overview of the site.

I have a database type website (but each page is a static HTML) that has images in it. That is my product, images. They are bought for billboards, posters, mugs, and for commercial web use.

I have learnt how important backlinks are, so I have offered the use of my images for free for web use, if they provide the backlink to my site (by copying the code off my site) (This will hopefully add backlinks, once my site gets better rankings) Using this technique to get my site out there.

I have recently been wondering about site structure.
This is the structure that I currently have:
I have a homepage and six key landing pages for different picture themes.

The homepage, links to the six landing pages and a sitemap. The sitemap links to 2500 individual image pages that have been cached (each sitemap page has about a max of a 100 links on it) and each sitemap page links to the homepage.

The 2500 individual image pages link to either the landing page or the homepage. If the individual image page is on the theme of the landing page it links to the specific landing page, else it links to the homepage.

My reasoning for this structure is that I want each of the landing pages to rank highly and each of the 2500 image pages to grab long tail searches.

Ideas?

Finally, just a question on the side, does anyone know of code I can implement to prevent people copying the pictures off my landing pages? Does this code still allow Google to see the images and rank them?


Many Thanks

Alex

[whitehat]

Wow. You dont want much do you ;)
Well, you should act upon the advice given in the first thread you started before starting a new thread.
There was some great information on there that has not been acted on when I last checked your site.
For example and the first thing I would fix
Different META description and META tags and title for each page on the site.
The title has to be for humans..not search engines...

and if it was me I would possibly rethink and maybe add to or change the search terms you are going for on the mainpage. How many people are searching for 'wildlife stock photography' as opposed to 'wildlife pictures' for example?
Granted, it is more cometitive but would reap more rewards Im sure.

wildlife-pictures-online dot com/ is the number one site for wildlife pictures...

Take a look at the competition and see what they are doing different and learn from it :cool:

[africapic]

Hi

Thanks for the tips.

I have acted on some of the advice.

1)

With regard to meta name and description...the system is a content generated system. All image pages (i.e. 2500)have name,keywords, and description that fit the image on the page. Most are unique.

There are some pages (8 of them) that do have identical keywords, description and title. These would be the pages with the buttons (i.e. about us, contact us, shopping cart)

Is it vital that I change these last eight too? I'm not really wanting these to be displayed and ranked in SE...all links to them are nofollowed.

2) with regard advice about changing my whole layout to a white theme...that would take ages and huge cost. When this project is successful, I would like to et programmers to give the user the choice of a white or black blackground. This is definitely in the pipeline. (Good tip)

3)
I am taking your advice and changing for a bigger goal...a little nervous...but I think it can be done...so., here goes...I'm going to go for wildlife pictures...watch this contestor to see if I can achieve that...Thanks for encouraging me to take on a bigger goal. :)


Regards

Alex

[whitehat]

Hi

Thanks for the tips.

I have acted on some of the advice.




Sounds like you are moving in the right direction Alex.

With regards to the page titles, for the 7 pages with the same titles, you risk duplicate content penalties if there are too many pages like this but I dont know what the threshhold is. (google is the king of secrets)

The other stock photo pages, The titles could be more user friendly than Cheetah Pictures| Cheetah Photos | Cheetah Stock Photography

Title is critical to getting ranked....and if you want your page to come up if someone searches for ' leopard pictures' for an example only.you need to focus on less keywords in the titles (no keyword spamming!).......you also need to include your site name in the titles ideally..

So it could be changed to something like...(purely an example)


Quality Cheetah Pictures from Africapic Stock Photography Gallery


2/ with regards to colour....this wont affect your SE rank, only traffic conversions once they arrive so you can maybe change that later... Shouldnt be too hard if it is a css & template based system

3/ good luck. Do NOT expect results overnight though....this game takes a lot of patience but if you take the advice on here....read a LOT of the great threads and learn the info, you will get there for sure :cool:

Also, quality backlinks, pay to be listed in Yahoo directory (AFTER you have got the site right), and list in lots of decent directories.
Having a PR 0 is a big drag when you are trying to rank well.
Repeat after me. "I will get 500 quality backlinks over the next 3 months"....and set to work to do this ;)

[africapic]

Yet again, thanks for taking the time to help advise.

With regard to the 7 duplicate pages "about us" "contact us", etc, all these pages are nofollowed in all links that point to them. I am hoping this sorts out that issue.

With the title of the landing page how do I optimise for the three phrases
1) cheetah pictures
2) cheetah photos
3) cheetah stock photography

I'm assuming Google picks up synonyms?

Would your suggested title "Quality Cheetah Pictures from Africapic Stock Photography Gallery" incorporate these all?

Anyone else have a thought on this?

What are your thoughts on the overall site structure?

Regards

Alex

[SeoCatfish]

bro you need to link all your cheetah pictures back to your main cheetah page with the text link cheetah pictures and do likewise for each category of pics you have. your internal link connectivity sucks right now.

[africapic]

Thanks...will definitely do that!

[africapic]

I've done that now...linked all cheetah pictures to the cheetah pictures page.

How is my internal link connectivity now? :-)

[whitehat]

I've done that now...linked all cheetah pictures to the cheetah pictures page.

How is my internal link connectivity now? :-)

I think you need to know that the current 'return from' this page link is javascript and therefore totally useless to google.

Java navigation is a big no no for SEO so i think you need to replace them with plain old html links

Also, just a sidenote but do you have watermarking software? because it would seem to me that your pictures are not watermarked 'enough' with the cross?

I also think you need to look (in the future) into getting some URL rewriting done to make some of the URLs more search friendly. One I found while navigating pics was
yoursite.com/index.php?module=media&pId=100&category=gallery/Amateur/SARecreation&start=0

Making a good link structure is more important for now though, so remove the return to thumbnails java!

[africapic]

Will def check out the javascript. Big thanks for the tip.

Url's are friendly...they are HTML and are rewritten in Google's eyes...to see them as Google sees them, go to the cheetah pictures landing page and then select a thumbnail. They are labelled mysite.com/cheetah-pictures-21119.html. We have used a mod rewrite.
Google can only find my pages by going through the sitemap...which shows the URLS as they are seen by Google.

Alex

[whitehat]

Will def check out the javascript. Big thanks for the tip.

Url's are friendly...they are HTML and are rewritten in Google's eyes...to see them as Google sees them, go to the cheetah pictures landing page and then select a thumbnail. They are labelled mysite.com/cheetah-pictures-21119.html. We have used a mod rewrite.
Google can only find my pages by going through the sitemap...which shows the URLS as they are seen by Google.

Alex

Indeed they are mostly re written. I didnt check in detail!
One thing I think wont be helping you is the keyword stuffing on each picture page

Keywords: Croc;Crocodile;Dangerous;Reptile;Water;STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY;PHOTO;PHOTOS;WILDLIFE;ANIMALS;SAFARI;N ATURE;PIC;PICS;PICTURES;PICTURE;IMAGE;IMAGES;FOTO; FOTOS

Is it not possible to add a small descriptoin for each picture as opposed to this?

[africapic]

Thanks for the keyword suggestion tip. We will leave them out for a while and see how that goes.

It's a bit hard to get a description...would take forever for each photo and in all likelihood the photographers would just cut and paste other descriptions anyway.

We'll see how the pages perform without the keywords.

What are your thoughts on the internal website structure? I have all photos pointing to the homepage, and if applicable, some point to the respective landing page. Is this good?

Thanks.

[africapic]

What do you mean by?



Also, just a sidenote but do you have watermarking software? because it would seem to me that your pictures are not watermarked 'enough' with the cross?

I think I am being thick, but just want to check it out.

My next SEO goal is learning how to generate links (after I have ascertained that my site is internally SEO ok (doesn't have to be perfect, but want as many errors out as possible)....will start reading more specific ideas/tips for this...

[whitehat]

I meant how the photographs are watermarked with a pale white cross...

I was wondering whether it was enough to protect your pictures

probably just me being paranoid though :)

http://www.photowatermark.com/

[africapic]

That watermark is sufficient. It is embedded in the image and would take forever to remove....I think people would rather just pay the 2Euros for the image than spend an hour removing it. :-)

[whitehat]

That watermark is sufficient. It is embedded in the image and would take forever to remove....I think people would rather just pay the 2Euros for the image than spend an hour removing it. :-)

2 euros?
I didnt realise they were that cheap!!
Quite sufficient in that case

[africapic]

Prices on the site vary!

I am really struggling to convert visitors, could I drop you an email for some of your thoughts? (I am quite new to SEO, I have learnt about research, and am now in the phase of learning about generating traffic. NExt phase to learn about is conversion.) I was thinking that with the traffic I have had, there should be more conversions. Do you have any obvious thoughts about this?

[SeoCatfish]

SEO = traffic, usability = conversions, do some reading on Web site usability.