www.fotoimpressions.com

[fotoengineer]

I've been a member of this site for many years and realized that I never before shared my site link with the camel community. I'd love you to take a look and offer your opinion on my work - I'd absolutely love to return the favor and create a thread where we can critique one another's web sites and maybe branch off inot discussion concerning SEO and general web site design.

My name is Paul D. Van Hoy II and I'm a professional wedding photographer here in Rochester NY/ You can view my web site at http://www.fotoimpressions.com

Looking forward to talking and trading links.
-paul

[webaware]

I had a nice lengthy reply to you and in my late night stupor, closed the browser window by accident. I'll do my best to summarize what I had already written.

First, design-wise I like the modern look of your web site. I imagine it fits with the artistic nature of your portraits.

From an SEO perspective, here's my take, both good and bad:

1. On your landing page:
   1. Your page title is perfect. It summarizes the business you're in (wedding photography) and even better, focuses on your geographic sales region. About the only thing I would add is a reference to your actual business name.
   2. Meta tags - you have tons of extra meta tags in the HTML. This may be required by the HTML generator used, but if not, get rid of all but the "keywords" and "description" meta tags. All the others are just extra stuff a search engine spider has to sift through to make sense of your site.
      Give 'em only what they want.
   3. Your meta keywords and meta description tags are perfect textbook examples of great content for those tags.
   4. Add alt attributes to your image tags with descriptive terms that focus on search terms your potential customers will be using such as "Rochester, New York Wedding Photographer"
   5. Add title attribute to your anchor (hyperlink) tags with descriptive terms that focus on search terms your potential customers will be using such as "Rochester NY Wedding Portraits" (note how I varied the text, yet the concept is the same --- same goes for your clients...some think "photos" others think "portraits")
   6. I didn't see a sitemap file (sitemap.xml). Create one and then submit it to all major search engines.
2. Your blog
   1. You have a blog! That's good! It gives you an outlet to describe your work to real human beings and it give search engines a lot of extra textual content to index to gain an understanding of your business [and hopefully rank you higher than those equivalent wedding photographers without a blog. (Despite SEO being all the rage, if a real human doesn't find your site useful, something's gone wrong)
   2. Your blog is hosted at a different domain than your main business web site. This actually works in your favor to a degree since search engines will see your blog and your main site as two physically separate sites. Since one link to the other you have some amount of positive weight given to each site due to the inter-linking between them.
   3. You're using Blogger (blogspot.com) so I know you are very restricted with the final HTML being outputted to the browser. It's kind of ugly and very "wordy", however since you have little control I won't go into detail (mainly lots of in-line CSS).
3. Your Flash content
   1. This is the one area I see that if you improved could really help your search rankings. Flash is horrid for influencing search engine rankings, so all content within your Flash sections is essentially unknown to search engines (not good...so if your competition has the equivalent content within HTML pages, chances are they will rank higher than you simply because that content is in a different format that search engines understand more easily - HTML vs. Flash)
   2. Consider an HTML version of your Flash content for no other reason than for search engines to pick up. My wife is a photographer in Milwaukee and this technique has worked wonders -- the HTML pages with session info and pricing rank close to as high as her main site for certain search terms, where as her Flash content (where all potential clients are directed to because it looks great) doesn't rank at all because search engines can't read it. You can even make the link to your HTML version slightly hidden so most humans (versus search engine spider) will go to your Flash site, whereas a search engine spider will crawl the HTML version link.

Don't hesitate to ask more questions or contact me privately if you have any follow up questions. Hope some of this feedback has helped.