deleted

?

-- A family man has photos in his wallet where his money used to be.

Hey Ben.

Good looking site. I do my fair share of website development, so after poking around on yours, here are a couple of suggestions for improving the SEO of your site:

1. Redesign your gallery pages to include some actual content, not just the images. If you write a little bit about each project it makes each page more rich and it gives you a chance to work in relevant keywords and also do some internal page linking (see here for some great SEO tips in general and a description of “internal page linking” #5.) For example, the “Kelly Porch Post” project could have a link to the “Fay and Scott Lathe” page, if you used that lathe on that project.
2. Make sure each page has a unique title. Right now, for example, if I go to your “Machines” page it has the title “Machines”. Then if I click the link for the “Fay and Scott Lathe” page it too has the title “Machines”. This is the case for your “Projects” page and each of those galleries as well. (see the link above for some additional tips on titles too.)
3. I’d also include the contact/description information you have in your banner logo down at the bottom footer of each page. I don’t think any search engines “read” images like that. If it is in a text format somewhere on the page you know it’ll be seen when your pages get crawled.
4. Finally, SEO is not just about what is on your site. That’s obviously important, but things like external links back to you your site also play a large part. (this site, although focused on health and weight loss, has some good information about external SEO.) You may also want to consider using a twitter account and/or Facebook page to further communicate with others.

As for posting here or just on your site, I think you need to do both, but don’t post the exact same thing in both places. For example, sometimes I just post a short teaser here about a project and provide a link back to my site for the full details. (like this) Also, feel free to include your main website link in your signature here on Lumberjocks (and any other community sites you participate in). It may not do much, but it sure won’t hurt. ;-) The fact is that Lumberjocks contains soooo much more content than you or I will ever have on our sites, and is in turn, much more indexed and higher ranked, some of our posts here will inevitably end up in someone’s search results. That’s not a bad thing though as long as they can still find you through that post.

Hope that helps!
- Marc

-- Marc, http://www.logicallymarc.com/

Well, hopefully that wasn’t a waste of my time. :-/

-- Marc, http://www.logicallymarc.com/

Hi Marc.
Not at all. Thanks so much. I had wanted to delete the post but couldn’t find a way to do it – hence replaced everything with “deleted.”

Would you be willing/interested in helping me a bit on the site for hire?

I am using wordpress with static “pages” as the site, and a bunch of different plugins. It gets confusing. I’d love to have a pro spend a few hours refining it with me.

I’ve been wanting to do exactly what you suggest re. adding text to the galleries, but I can’t figure out how to do this with the plugin I’m using (NextGen Gallery). There must be a way to do it with simple code, but I could spend days trying to figure it out (I already have).

I will work on implementing the other suggestions right away.

Thanks again man!
Ben

Sorry Ben, WordPress is not my “thing”. Plus, my day job is writing code so I try to avoid it outside of my cubicle if at all possible. ;-) Luckily for you there are lots of people and resources for building a WordPress press site. If you really want to hire someone to help you out I’m sure you’ll be able to find somebody.

Best of luck!

-- Marc, http://www.logicallymarc.com/