Website Crit

[danny_bhoy]

Evening all,

Just about getting the website the way I pictured it when I first started out. Would really value a few opinions on the overall look, feel and navigation of the site.

Also, I've made the conscious decision to only show about a dozen or so images from any one wedding in slideshow format on my 'latest work' pages. I know that most wedding photographers tend to show loads and loads of images in a vertical scrolling format but that never appealed to me.

Oh, and any SEO improvements that you think I could make would be good too....still getting a bit caned with the old SEO

For anyone on the app it's: www.dannybirrellphotography.co.uk

Thanks!

 

[Solo man]

Can't really comment on the images or written content(as I don't do weddings)...
However.... an error in spelling under your 'products' page... on the first line you need to correct the spelling of 'isle' to 'aisle'
And...' Latest work' - under John and Mary's wedding, you have written ".... to cover weddings as places like this.", you need to change 'as' to 'at'

 

[danny_bhoy]

Can't really comment on the images or written content(as I don't do weddings)...
However.... an error in spelling under your 'products' page... on the first line you need to correct the spelling of 'isle' to 'aisle'
And...' Latest work' - under John and Mary's wedding, you have written ".... to cover weddings as places like this.", you need to change 'as' to 'at'

Great, thanks for the spot.

I've done a few Peek user tests and they're good to a point but don't pick up things like this.

 

[UaeExile]

I like your site Danny, nice and clean looking. I haven't scoured for spelling mistakes mind you.

What I would say is your pricing looks way off. £795 for a full day including a pre-wedding shoot is far too cheap.

 

[danny_bhoy]

I like your site Danny, nice and clean looking. I haven't scoured for spelling mistakes mind you.

What I would say is your pricing looks way off. £795 for a full day including a pre-wedding shoot is far too cheap.

Thanks for taking a look

Yeah, I really struggled with the pricing but settled on 795 as it's my first full year. It kinda fits in with the mid-range guys in the area which, for now, suits me. It's not where I want to be forever - the aim is to steadily increase prices year on year as I build a bigger portfolio and reputation.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to play the long game

 

[Bowz]

Nice site Danny, as said above nice and clean.

Only thing I would say (and it really is nitpicking )is that you mention County Durham and Northumberland but no mention of Tyne & Wear, perhaps it should be included somewhere so its picked up by the search engines, after all the greater population (and therefore customers) of the North East live in Tyne & Wear.

Best of luck with the site

Graeme

 

[danny_bhoy]

Nice site Danny, as said above nice and clean.

Only thing I would say (and it really is nitpicking )is that you mention County Durham and Northumberland but no mention of Tyne & Wear, perhaps it should be included somewhere so its picked up by the search engines, after all the greater population (and therefore customers) of the North East live in Tyne & Wear.

Best of luck with the site

Graeme

Cheers Graeme.

Yeah I probably should work Tyne & Wear in there somewhere. I went for specific locations as that's what prospective clients might be more likely to search for but, you're right, the more info the better.

Thanks again mate.

 

[ndwgolf]

I like it................a nice lay out with some nice pictures. Congrats

 

[nass]

Logo and name at the top don't look very smooth on my monitor but the rest seems straightforward, basically ok. SEO trickery isn't really going to propel your site to general prominence, there probably just isn't enough content on the site as a whole for it to make a huge splash.

 

[danny_bhoy]

Logo and name at the top don't look very smooth on my monitor but the rest seems straightforward, basically ok. SEO trickery isn't really going to propel your site to general prominence, there probably just isn't enough content on the site as a whole for it to make a huge splash.

Thanks for taking a look Johan......I keep meaning to make time to re-size the logo as I realise it does alias quite badly.

Yeah, I'm aware that more content will propel me a bit furtehr up the rankings ladder - that will only come with time I suppose. To be honest, I think I've done as much as I can as far as SEO optimisation goes for now - there are only so many keywords you can stuff into a page without it sounding like a mish-mash bunch of keywords.

 

[Nick65]

Hi Danny,

As others have said, you've got a nice looking site there, but if you want to improve your rankings, you've got to improve your SEO. Google, Bing and Yahoo aren't going to do it for you.

Have you created a sitemap and submitted it to each of these three search engines? Have you registered your site with Google WebMaster Tools (WMT) and Google Analytics? You say you don't have much content on your site, but then looking at the source code of the pages on your site you repeat the same meta description* on each page. Once you've got WMT loaded and have run it for a couple of weeks, it will flag up any site problems as well as telling you what terms people are using to find your site, use this information to think about how more people can find you, examine the click through rate (CTR) the higher this is, the more people like your page titles and page description. Look at the positioning of your pages in WMT, are you on the first page for specific terms that you want to be found for?

* The meta description is perhaps one of the most important parts of your website page, it is the short descriptive bit of information you see when Google returns its search results.

HTH

Nick

P.S. Don't keyword stuff (certainly not by repeating the same thing piece of text, Google will get the information if you just include it once). Create interesting and worthwhile information and the visitors should find your site.

 

[danny_bhoy]

Hi Danny,

As others have said, you've got a nice looking site there, but if you want to improve your rankings, you've got to improve your SEO. Google, Bing and Yahoo aren't going to do it for you.

Have you created a sitemap and submitted it to each of these three search engines? Have you registered your site with Google WebMaster Tools (WMT) and Google Analytics? You say you don't have much content on your site, but then looking at the source code of the pages on your site you repeat the same meta description* on each page. Once you've got WMT loaded and have run it for a couple of weeks, it will flag up any site problems as well as telling you what terms people are using to find your site, use this information to think about how more people can find you, examine the click through rate (CTR) the higher this is, the more people like your page titles and page description. Look at the positioning of your pages in WMT, are you on the first page for specific terms that you want to be found for?

* The meta description is perhaps one of the most important parts of your website page, it is the short descriptive bit of information you see when Google returns its search results.

HTH

Nick

P.S. Don't keyword stuff (certainly not by repeating the same thing piece of text, Google will get the information if you just include it once). Create interesting and worthwhile information and the visitors should find your site.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for taking the time to have a look - it really is appreciated.

The SEO thing is something that I'm definitely struggling with. On one hand I'm determined to keep the site clean and free from 'clutter' and on the other hand I know that is more or less SEO suicide. I've tried to place keywords as carefully as I can without it looking like it reads purely for SEO purposes. I think once I get a bit more content on there as I blog my next few weddings that should improve things a little.

I've been signed up with WMT and Analytics for a while and try to keep my eye on them as much as possible. I submitted a sitemap to Google a few months ago - whether that's actually made a difference to anything I'm not so sure. I'm off to work out how to submit to Bing & Yahoo now.

I've taken your advice about the meta descriptions and each page is different now. I'm sure my thinking in making them all the same was that the more I repeated keywords in the descriptions, the more likely I was to be found under those terms. Starting to realise that's not the case

Again Nick, your help is invaluable. Any other improvements you can think of in the same vein would be like gold dust!

 

[Nick65]

Hi Danny,

Great news that you've changed the meta description, but put yourself in a prospective Bride's shoes for a moment and have a look at your site here. Would any of those link descriptions encourage you to click through to your site? If they do, great, if they don't then work on them. As I said to Dave/@bass_junkie83 last week (http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/th...people-really-search-for.567596/#post-6581252), have a look in Google Webmaster Tools, look at how many times your site is being shown and see what the click through rate is, if it's less than say 5% CTR, then it's not your rankings that are the problem, it's the fact that you aren't enticing visitors to click through to your site.

This is a great video by Matt Cutts of Google explaining page titles and descriptions. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

Bing and Yahoo have made it a bit easier now, they both use Microsoft's Web Master Tools for submitting sitemaps. Have a look here http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-submit-sitemaps-82a15bd4 and for Yahoo here https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-merchant-solutions/submit-sitemap-file-search-engines-sln19497.html.

Cheers

Nick

 

[danny_bhoy]

Hi Danny,

Great news that you've changed the meta description, but put yourself in a prospective Bride's shoes for a moment and have a look at your site here. Would any of those link descriptions encourage you to click through to your site? If they do, great, if they don't then work on them. As I said to Dave/@bass_junkie83 last week (http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/th...people-really-search-for.567596/#post-6581252), have a look in Google Webmaster Tools, look at how many times your site is being shown and see what the click through rate is, if it's less than say 5% CTR, then it's not your rankings that are the problem, it's the fact that you aren't enticing visitors to click through to your site.

This is a great video by Matt Cutts of Google explaining page titles and descriptions. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

Bing and Yahoo have made it a bit easier now, they both use Microsoft's Web Master Tools for submitting sitemaps. Have a look here http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-submit-sitemaps-82a15bd4 and for Yahoo here https://help.yahoo.com/kb/yahoo-merchant-solutions/submit-sitemap-file-search-engines-sln19497.html.

Cheers

Nick

Thanks again Nick. Although I've updated them, I think the meta descriptions could still maybe do with jazzing up a little.
I'm going to have a good delve into Google Webmaster Tools this afternoon - still finding soem of it a bit baffling but I'll take extra note of my CTR.
I'll check out those links too Nick, thanks.
I feel slightly as if I've hit a bit of a brick wall, in as much as I've done as much as I can do apart from the odd tweak you've suggested. After that I'll just have to try and make regular updates and hope to climb the rankings a bit.

 

[Nick65]

I feel slightly as if I've hit a bit of a brick wall, in as much as I've done as much as I can do apart from the odd tweak you've suggested. After that I'll just have to try and make regular updates and hope to climb the rankings a bit.

Your site is really good, you just need to get more people to find it.

Before committing to regular updates (which is never a bad idea) work out where your site is at the moment. If you go into Search Traffic > Search Queries in Google WMT, by default you'll see the top queries results. In the first column you'll see snippets of how your site was found by people searching (i.e. what terms/phrases people are typing into their search engine), the next column is impressions, which is how many times a link to your site was shown by the search engine, the clicks column is how many people then clicked on those links to go to your site, giving you the CTR - click through rate (which is the bit that you need to work on if it's low, less than 5%). The last column is the Avg. position, this shows you where your page is displaying in the list of search engine results. A position over 10 and your page is likely to be on the second page of any search results and so likely not be seen, so I'd begin by concentrating any work on any page that has a position over this.

Whilst you are in the Search Queries page, click on the Top pages tab, and see which are your most popular pages. Again look at the CTR and Avg. position, are your most popular pages the ones that you want people to find first? if not then again concentrate on getting them in a better order, for example I would think that your homepage, pricing and contact pages were the most important to you, so try to get them in the top 5 of your top pages.

Unfortunately SEO isn't a one hit wonder, but by regularly checking WMT and analytics, you'll be able to fine tune your site and over time you'll find that you just have to do a few changes little and often.

 

[Nick65]

I forgot to add: Work on your image alt and title tags on each of your website pages as well. This is particularly important if you don't have a lot of text on your site. Again, don't keyword stuff, but as an example rather than having this <img class="thumb-image" alt="JA WEDDING-169.jpg" data-src="... which you have on one of your images on your homepage, you could change the alt text to something more descriptive like <img class="thumb-image" alt="The wedding of Bob and Jane at Newcastle United football stadium, in October" data-src="..." but don't make all of the images have the same text, be creative, but always try to think how are visitors going to be searching for my site. I'm not sure if you are using Wordpress or Joomla, but if they have an option for a title tag for the images, use that as well, but use a different way of describing the same image, so using the above as an example you might have <img class="thumb-image" alt="The wedding of Bob and Jane at Newcastle United football stadium, in October" title="Newcastle United stadium was a perfect setting for the wedding of Bob and Jane" data-src="..."

 

[danny_bhoy]

Your site is really good, you just need to get more people to find it.

Before committing to regular updates (which is never a bad idea) work out where your site is at the moment. If you go into Search Traffic > Search Queries in Google WMT, by default you'll see the top queries results. In the first column you'll see snippets of how your site was found by people searching (i.e. what terms/phrases people are typing into their search engine), the next column is impressions, which is how many times a link to your site was shown by the search engine, the clicks column is how many people then clicked on those links to go to your site, giving you the CTR - click through rate (which is the bit that you need to work on if it's low, less than 5%). The last column is the Avg. position, this shows you where your page is displaying in the list of search engine results. A position over 10 and your page is likely to be on the second page of any search results and so likely not be seen, so I'd begin by concentrating any work on any page that has a position over this.

Whilst you are in the Search Queries page, click on the Top pages tab, and see which are your most popular pages. Again look at the CTR and Avg. position, are your most popular pages the ones that you want people to find first? if not then again concentrate on getting them in a better order, for example I would think that your homepage, pricing and contact pages were the most important to you, so try to get them in the top 5 of your top pages.

Unfortunately SEO isn't a one hit wonder, but by regularly checking WMT and analytics, you'll be able to fine tune your site and over time you'll find that you just have to do a few changes little and often.

I forgot to add: Work on your image alt and title tags on each of your website pages as well. This is particularly important if you don't have a lot of text on your site. Again, don't keyword stuff, but as an example rather than having this <img class="thumb-image" alt="JA WEDDING-169.jpg" data-src="... which you have on one of your images on your homepage, you could change the alt text to something more descriptive like <img class="thumb-image" alt="The wedding of Bob and Jane at Newcastle United football stadium, in October" data-src="..." but don't make all of the images have the same text, be creative, but always try to think how are visitors going to be searching for my site. I'm not sure if you are using Wordpress or Joomla, but if they have an option for a title tag for the images, use that as well, but use a different way of describing the same image, so using the above as an example you might have <img class="thumb-image" alt="The wedding of Bob and Jane at Newcastle United football stadium, in October" title="Newcastle United stadium was a perfect setting for the wedding of Bob and Jane" data-src="..."

Really grateful for the above advice Nick - lots to mull over there.

It's a Squarespace site so it's either going to be really starightforward to update the Alt tags on the images or it'll be a complete pain in the rear to figure out! You've given me loads to chew on though so that's my night sorted......who thought that's how I'd end up spending my saturday nights eh

Again mate, really appreciate the time you've taken. I'm sure the above will help a few other people out too.

 

[Nick65]

Really grateful for the above advice Nick - lots to mull over there.

It's a Squarespace site so it's either going to be really starightforward to update the Alt tags on the images or it'll be a complete pain in the rear to figure out! You've given me loads to chew on though so that's my night sorted......who thought that's how I'd end up spending my saturday nights eh

Glad I could offer some help.

Here's how you add alt text to your images in Squarespace http://help.squarespace.com/guides/can-i-add-alt-text-to-my-images (as an aside, can you see how they've used the page name to help with their SEO).

You don't need to do it all tonight , or all in one go (slowly slowly catchy monkey). Start by measuring your site metrics, make some changes, measure again and see if what you did made a difference, if it did, do more of it, if it didn't try something else (or ask here).

Cheers

Nick