Questions created by shannmg1
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Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice
First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
> Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
> Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?0 -
Contact Page
I'm currently designing a new website for my wife, who just started her own wedding/engagement photography business. I'm trying to build it as SEO friendly as possible, but she brought up an idea that she likes that I've never tried before. Typically on all the websites I've ever built, I've had a dedicated contact page that has the typical contact form. Because that contact form on a wedding photographers website is almost as important as selling a product on an e-commerce site, she brought up the possibility of putting the contact form in the footer site-wide (minus maybe the homepage) rather than having a dedicated contact page. And in the navigation, where you have links such as "Home", "Portfolio", "About", "Prices", "Contact", etc. the "Contact" navigation item would transfer the user to the bottom of the page they are on rather than a new page. Any thoughts on which way would be better for a case like this, and any positives/negatives for doing it each way? One thought I had is that if it's in the footer rather than it's own page, it would lose it's search-ability as it's technically duplicate content on each page. But then again, that's what a footer is. Thanks, Mickey
Technical SEO | | shannmg10 -
High Quality Domains and what to do with them
Hi, I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering: Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong? Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume? Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail. Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg10 -
Keyword Over-usage?
I have a photography page, where there are a number of galleries. In the galleries and thumbnails of each photo I'm selling. These also include the title. It's built dynamically. However, I've noticed when I do an on-page grade check, that one of the places I'm failing is over-using the keyword on the page. This is mainly due to the titles of each photo containing that keyword. For example, there might be a photo gallery for images of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and 30 of the 40 images on the page have a title with "Golden Gate Bridge" in them. So naturally, the title is displaying this on the page and showing up 30+ times (after the term is used in the page text as well). Is this a really big problem, or is the benefit on each individual photo page outweighing any hit on the gallery page? Any thoughts? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | shannmg10 -
Using images from one domain on another?
I run a travel photography business where I sell fine art prints. I've been toying with the idea of creating a few new websites about some of the places I've traveled to. This is for a few reasons. First, because I love talking about my travels. But second, because I feel like it might be a good way to bring in more print sales from those places. The question I have, if I were to use the images from my main photography sales domain on a different domain, how does this affect SEO? These images filenames for the photographs are already optimized well for searching. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shannmg10 -
Is there any benefit to removing brand name from the title tag?
I just signed up for Moz recently, and have noticed that in my crawl errors, I have hundreds of issues with my title tag being too long. My business is selling prints for landscape/travel/nature photography, and I've built these pages dynamically to where the title tag for pages selling individual photos has the title of the photo for sale followed by a hyphen and then the brand name. The same goes for gallery pages "Gallery Name | Brand Name". Would it be worth it to shorten the title tags by removing the brand name from these pages? Or will that actually harm more than help? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | shannmg10