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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

Website: http://www.liveimagegreenscreen.com/index.html

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?

I read the SEOmoz beginers guide and it said that it's beneficial to place keywords in the URL as long as you don't overdo it.  However, this seems awkward for common pages, such as "Home", "About", "Contact" etc....

I've currently targeted a specific keyword for each page on my site, as follows:

Home: "Green Screen"

Work: "Greenscreen"

About: "Event Photography"

Pricing: "Green Screen Photography"

Should I rename the URLs as:

Home: ...com/green-screen-home.html

Work: ...com/greenscreen-work.html

About:...com/about-event-photography.html

Pricing:...com/green-screen-photography-pricing.html

Thanks, this is exactly what I'm looking for!  I checked out www.smallpetselect.com and I can't believe how many Facebook "Likes" they have and how many Twitter followers they have, for such a small website.

Do you have any plug-ins or photo gallery embedding software that you can recommend?

I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.

I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family.  So my questions are:

1. How do I get visitors to spend more time on my website vs. leaving to go to the www.smugmug.com website?

2. How do I get visitors to share our website/gallery/photos via social media like Google+, Facebook, etc... and bring traffic to our website?

Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought when migrating to the new website.  And thanks for the link.  Another member recommended it to me last night and I read through the whole thing.  It's very easy to understand and just enough info.

I was wondering if you might chime in on another question that I had after reading that article.

I read in the article that Google takes into consideration, the popularity of your page.  This meaning that your website has a very low bounce rate.

I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.

I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family.

It seems that with the online gallery it's a great way to drive traffic to our website and also take advantage of social media platforms.  However, I just can't put finger on how to best go about this.

I read in the article that Google takes into consideration, the popularity of your page.  This meaning that your website has a very low bounce rate.

I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com.

I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family.

It seems that with the online gallery it's a great way to drive traffic to our website and also take advantage of social media platforms.  However, I just can't put finger on how to best go about this.

Thanks, just spent the last hour and read the entire article. Very easy to read and just enough info to get me started.

I'm wondering if there is any benefit to creating a FAQ section on a website for the purpose of ranking for long tail keywords.  If so, are there best practices in the way that the page is structured?

Also, would doing this just help me rank the FAQ page for these terms or would it also help more critical pages on my website, such as homepage, contact, about, etc... which do not contain these keywords.

Hi Miriam,

Regarding the redesign, I'm currently using Weebly, which is a website building software.  However, it's very basic and limiting in functionality, so my website is decent, but not to the level of professionalism that I'd like.

Adobe has just released the website builder "Adobe Muse", which is an amazing piece of software that allows for extremely intricat and professional website design without the need to code.  I'm planning on redesigning the entire website with this software.

Will a complete redesign using this software hurt the SEO work that I've already done?  Are there best practices when doing this, such as naming pages the same as the old website, etc....?

Thanks Miriam!  What you suggest makes perfect sense.  In my mind, I had the dilema as to whether I should write keyword stuffed content for SEO or write well written informative content for the reader.  I guess that I need to mainly focus on good content and insert keywords where they fit naturally.

A few more questions if you don't mind.

1.  Should each page be aimed at one specific type of keyword?  For instance, the contact page would be focused towards location keywords, such as "SF photo booth", "Bay Area photo booth", "San Francisco Photo Booth", etc.....  And the homepage could be focused on more generic terms, such as "Photo Booth", "Rent Photo Booths", "Photo Booth Rental", etc...  Or should I just place these keywords throughout the website without regard to page?

2.  Our photo booth rental business serves most cities in Northern California.  I've currently created unique pages for each city that we serve, such as "Oakland Photo Booth", "Fremont Photo Booth", "Napa Photo Booth", etc...  It's been very successful and I rank for most all of the cities.  However, I'm redesigning the website and it's a ton of work to create a unique page for each city, so I'd like to try and avoid doing this again.

Instead I'd like to list the County, followed by the cities in that county on my "Contact Page" and write a small paragraph explaining that we serve these area and have different travel rates depending on city.  Would this work for SEO and would it be considered spam. ie: "Alameda County: Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, etc..."

I'm a noobie when it comes to SEO, with my knowledge coming from a few books and blogs.  What are some of the best practices that you use when building a website for SEO and for user interaction?  I've read about the following, but am not sure if they are still relevant.  Also if you have any other suggestions, they would be appreciated.

-Phone # above fold line.

-A call to action above fold line on each page

-An HTML sitemap

-Terms & Conditions (supposed to create credibility in Googles eyes)

-NAP in the footer of each page

-Optimize each page for 1 unique keyword

Are these correct and is there anything else that I'm missing?

Thanks for the link!

For a lot of long tail keywords, there is really no way to make
them sound natural in the text of the website. For instance, "photo booth
san francisco", "photo booth sf", or misspellings such as
"san francisco photobooth", etc....

The terms themselves are awkward. It just seems difficult to
legitimately integrate the keywords into the text body. Is there another
method, such as stuffing them into the footer, or creating a list of keywords
on the page?

Hi,

I run a small photo booth rental business in San Francisco, CA that serves the greater Bay Area.  I've created different webpages for each location that we serve, ie: "San Francisco Photo Booth", "Oakland Photo Booth", "San Jose Photo Booth", etc....

I'm assuming that for each city, the strongest keyword would be "City-Photo Booth".  However, I also want to target different variations of the keyword, such as:

San Francisco Photo Booth:

-Photo Booth San Francisco

-SF Photo Booth

-San Francisco Photobooth

-San Francisco, CA Photo Booth

-etc....

Will adding these keywords onto the same webpage dilute the relevance of my main keyword "San Francisco Photo Booth"?  Also, is there any way to place these words within the text of the webpage so that it does not sound akward and unnatural to the reader?  Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

I've had this happen to me on numerous occassions.  I used www.copyscape.com to find the infringing material.

I first contact Google and Yahoo to have the content removed from search results.  Next, a few days later, I send a DMCA complaint letter to the hosting company and the website will be removed, usually within a few hours.  Then, the website owner will usually contact you and you can discuss as to how he/she will remove your content from their website.