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I'll probably do the API.
I know that Yelp doesnt want business owners to solicit reviews. However, it's extremely difficult to get reviews unless you do. I send out follow up emails to clients after each job and ask for a review (positive or negative), but I've still only received about 13 reviews in a year. I'm even thinking about creating a giveaway drawing for those that review each month.
Hi Mark,
I took a look at 2 of my competitors who have professional looking websites and who also use www.smugmug.com to host their online galleries. This is what I found. Are either one of them doing this correctly?
Company 1: http://companyname.smugmug.com/SF
Company 2: http://photos.companyname.com/San-Francisco
In regards to ranking organically for local search results (not google places), I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a Google Map on my Contact page with our location pinned? If so, how important do you think it is?
I'm kind of on the fence about this one. Should I include a social media icon for Yelp on my website? We have great reviews, but so do most of my competitors. I'd like to share my reviews, but I also do not want to send traffic away from my website to another website (Yelp) that lists my competitors. What do you think?
OK, I'll take that into consideration. I run a photo booth website and had tried to build links for that, but I found it so difficult. In the end I just created a lot of citations in yellowpages, merchant circle, gig masters, yahoo local, google local, linkedin, flickr, wedding wire, the knot, etc.... Are these the type of links that you're talking about or are you referring more to links from wedding blogs, other businesses, event venues, etc...?
H1&H2, got it! Thanks for catching the Jeremytech.com links. I'm using a template and didn't even notice that.
Yeah, I'm going to build out more pages. On my pricing page I have a number of options geared towards event marketing customers. I might create a "Learn More" link next to each option, which would link to a new page that goes in more depth about that option.
Also as you had suggested, a "Green Screen 101" type of page would be both informative and help to create content for my website. However, I'm not sure where I would put a link to pages such as these, because they are really secondary information and shouldn't be included in the top menu bar. Is it best to put a link at the footer of my homepage for these type of pages or is there another place that the link should be placed.
What is the benefits/drawbacks of creating web pages for this informative content vs. creating a blog and making them articles in the blog?
Very helpful, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions so thoroughly!
Thanks Brent,
The site is still under construction, so I'm going to be adding a contact page for each location that we serve, "San Francisco", "Los Angeles", "San Diego", "Orange County" and will be using a unique street address, email, and phone # for each location. Since "Green Screen" is already part of my URL, would you advise against naming each page: http://www.liveimagegreenscreen.com/SanFranciscoGreenScreen.com, etc..., because of redundancy?
Also, thanks for the canonicalization tip. I had no clue about that.
Thanks for the reply! If you don't mind, would you take a look at my website an let me know if I'm headed in the right direction. I'm not done building the website, but I worked on getting the text, title tags, descriptions to where I want them. Below is a list of the page and the keyword that I tried to optimize for. I tried to put the keyword once in the heading, once in the pitch line, and 3-4 times in the text body.
Home: Green Screen
About: Event Photography
Work: Greenscreen
Pricing: Green Screen Photography
I think that I understand what you're saying. So just leave the Home, About, Contact pages as just that, without adding any additional keywords to the URL.
We really only offer 1 service, which is Green screen event photography. However, when potential customers search for our service, I'd imagine they'd use different variations of the term, such as:
Green Screen
Greenscreen
Green Screen Photography
Green Screen Events
Event Photography
It's not possible to create a new webpage for each keyword, because they are really just gramatical variations of the same service. So I've just assigned them to existing web pages, such as Home, About, Contact, etc....and worked the keywords into each page so that it reads naturally to the human reader.
Do you think that it's OK like this?
Very helpful, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions so thoroughly!
I'll probably do the API.
I know that Yelp doesnt want business owners to solicit reviews. However, it's extremely difficult to get reviews unless you do. I send out follow up emails to clients after each job and ask for a review (positive or negative), but I've still only received about 13 reviews in a year. I'm even thinking about creating a giveaway drawing for those that review each month.