How to get your photography website ranked higher in Google?

Are there any legit tricks to getting higher rankings for your key words with Google? Do you ever worry about Yahoo and Bing? I've noticed that I come up higher in Google than on Yahoo and Bing. Now why is that? Is there a way to be ranked equally the same across all of them?

Google is pretty secretive about their exact ranking algorithms. The safest bet is to have your site Search Engine Optimized (SEO). Things like site design can play a big aspect. Flash is a big SEO no no. search engines cant index flash websites so they dont usually get very high rankings. Meta tags should be used, proper use of robots.txt.

After that, you get into site popularity. How many sites link to you? what is the quality of the sites that are linking to you? Do you have original content? new content? regularly updated content?

As for being ranked equally? no... theres no way. Each search engine has its own proprietary ranking algorithms. Heck even different international Google domains will return different results. Thats simply relevance. If i type just my name, Geoff Ellis, into google.ca my site is 4th. If i type the exact same thing into google.com.au my site is 6th

One trick that used to work well (don't know about now) is to have key words imbedded repeatedly on your site with font color matching background color. It doesn't show on the site but a search engine might pick it up and say "wow, this must be a good one".

I have found that the more sites linking in is the greatest help, but that is after you have already meta tagged all your pages and images with your keywords. I am not sure if this helps or not, but corectly naming your images may make a difference. Rather than, DSC_1299, something like Richard_K_Photography_New_York_Photography.img can add keywords in there. If I am wrong about this please let me know!!

Cheers,
G

Baydream wrote: One trick that used to work well (don't know about now) is to have key words imbedded repeatedly on your site with font color matching background color. It doesn't show on the site but a search engine might pick it up and say "wow, this must be a good one".

Ya... there are a bunch of "tricks" like that... however if caught the search engine will completely remove your site from the listings. then you have no rank. BMW (the major car manufacturer) got caught doing that a few years back. Their website was removed from googles search results.

Good advice and links here:
www.robotstxt.org/faq/bestlisting.html

geoffellis wrote:

Baydream wrote: One trick that used to work well (don't know about now) is to have key words imbedded repeatedly on your site with font color matching background color. It doesn't show on the site but a search engine might pick it up and say "wow, this must be a good one".

Ya... there are a bunch of "tricks" like that... however if caught the search engine will completely remove your site from the listings. then you have no rank. BMW (the major car manufacturer) got caught doing that a few years back. Their website was removed from googles search results.

How long were the removed for? I bet someone at BMW got in hot water!

i dont recall. probably no more than a week or two... if that. I believe they just had to correct the offensive coding, and they made a public apology i believe, although i dont think that it was a "requirement"

geoffellis wrote:

Baydream wrote: One trick that used to work well (don't know about now) is to have key words imbedded repeatedly on your site with font color matching background color. It doesn't show on the site but a search engine might pick it up and say "wow, this must be a good one".

Ya... there are a bunch of "tricks" like that... however if caught the search engine will completely remove your site from the listings. then you have no rank. BMW (the major car manufacturer) got caught doing that a few years back. Their website was removed from googles search results.

Huh... you wouldn't think a company like BMW would need such tricks. How foolish.

MagsWPhoto wrote: Huh... you wouldn't think a company like BMW would need such tricks. How foolish.

Why would BMW be any different than any other company using these tricks? The whole point is to get an advantage in rankings. I wouldnt expect a company like BMW use them... but they are no different in needing such tricks if they want an advantage over competitors.