Keywords are a nightmare! To place well in google (other search engines are available) rankings, you need relevant keywords with links to your site from external sources. Pretty much. But they need to be written in natural language so that you don’t alienate readers. So my rank on Leicestershire Photographer is very good because I can say I’m a Leicestershire Photographer and so on in natural language. However, when searching google, more people type “Photographer Leicestershire” most likely because they first search for ‘photographer’ and realise there are millions of irrelevant entries so then go back and add ‘Leicestershire’ to their search. I’m only on page 5 for that search (which in itself is not bad – I was unlisted until I went to a course run by a very good Leicestershire web design company).

So how do I get “Photographer Leicestershire” into natural language? I wonder if it ignores punctuation, so “I am a photographer, Leicestershire based” would be ok? Who knows? It’s a black art, but one I’m learning to get good at!

It’s not all photography, you know!

The reason for the change on the Tuesday Challenge picture viewer is because it doesn’t take any time. I don’t have a lot of time these days. Well, I do, but I need it for earning pennies to pay my mortgage and eat and, indeed, clothe myself if I’m not going to scare the clients. My photo catalogue software will throw one of those pages out for me for free.

I shall experiment with different presentations over the next few weeks. Let me know what you think (experience tells me you’ll have no problem doing that). But I’m not going to spend any large amount of time on presenting the challenge. If I have to do that, the challenge will stop.

Thank-you for your co-operation.

That’s “Search Engine Optimisation”.

It’s one of those terms that’s bandied about and none of us (read “me, last week”) have a clue what it’s all about. I’ve been paying lots of money for Google AdWords lately, and my site has been pretty much unlisted on the ‘natural’ listings of google. Last week I attended an SEO seminar and miraculously (or through a lot of hard work), my site now typically appears on the first page of the google listings.

There’s nothing sneaky about it – it’s just a case of building your site properly. Gone are the days when you plastered your site with white-on-white text full of keywords. Search engines detect that nowadays. You pretty much have to do it properly.

The chap who taught us was from Studio-40 in Loughborough. He presented everything in a most understandable way (for me and my tech background at any rate). So, I’d highly recommend doing a little SEO unless you’re a Leicestershire photographer in which case SEO is rubbish and I wouldn’t do any at all if I were you. That’s right. Absolutely rubbish and not worth the effort.

Did my cunning plan to fend off local competition work?

Last time my blog went down, the server had gone boom. It hasn’t this time. But it was going rattle rattle rattle crash. Rattle rattle crash. Crawl crawl rattle crawl crash.

So I thought it was time to swap out the very very broken hard drive and completely reinstall. There was so much rubbish on there from many many years of poor organisation, and I thought it might be time for a fresh start. All the data is filed away somewhere in a dark basement with a sign saying “beware of the leopard”. The Tuesday Challenge pictures are even safer… they’re in a neat filing system.

But I think it’s fresh start time on the blog. Mainly because I tried to restore the backup and it didn’t work straight away, and it’s 8:58 and I have work to do.