In February of 2010, I was contracted to help improve the rankings of Amy Jones Design, a photography business in Conway, AR. Amy had a good website hosted and ran by Photobiz.com. She wasn’t getting much traffic and her ranking was buried on the third page for the keywords “photographer, Conway, AR. ” I was also interested in the keywords “photography, Conway, AR.”
My job was to help improve her search engine rankings. My goal was to get her on the first page in one or both of the keyword phrases I mentioned above. I set out to accomplish this by taking a look at what improvements could be made to the SEO of her site as well as other “tasks” which we might implement.
I want to mention three of the tasks we implemented which are easy for anyone to implement.
1. Set up a Facebook fan page--This might have been the single biggest task. I set up a Facebook fan page and Amy took the task to heart and grew her fans to over 800. Amy came up with the idea in which she would give away a package for her “funniest kid picture” contest. To vote, a person had to “like” her page (Facebook changed from “fan” to “like” during the middle of the contest).
2. Set up a blog--Unfortunately, we were unable to put a blog on her domain with Photobiz, so we set up a blog on WordPress. Nevertheless, I coached Amy to post at least once a week, and she began to create some posts which had a strong link to her website and her Facebook page.
3. Tweak keywords–We tweaked the keywords on her website making sure that they were present on every page. Amy’s site at Photobiz is flash based, but they provide an html mirror making this a very important task. As I said, the keywords I targeted were “photographer, Conway, AR” and “photography, Conway, AR.”
There were some other tasks we implemented as well, but these were the three main strategies, and they worked! I checked the keywords on Google today and her website is on the first page for “photographer, Conway, AR.” We are on the second page for the other keyword phrase. It took a little less than three months.
We also have great placement in Google for some other keywords.
Just having a website is not always enough. Having one that ranks well can lead to more traffic, more sales!