Hi,

I have recently set-up business in Northampton, in the UK, as a reportage wedding photographer.

My website has been live for about 4-5 months, and up until a few days ago it was on page 9 of google.co.uk for the phrase "northampton wedding photographer". Today it's fallen to page 31 !

I made some changes to the site over the past few weeks. I added some pages (ie www.paintedbylight.co.uk/cambridge.html or .....uk/bedford.html) which were made for locally targetted adwords advertisements to point to. The pages were basically the same as index.html with some changes to the text to reflect the locality they were serving.

Is this a mistake?

Google Adwords suggests using specially targetted pages for adwords, but maybe this is bad for SE ranking? Maybe I have mis-understood their advice?

While I am on the subject of Adwords, it has achieved no sales for me in two months of trying it.

I have also been blogging, commenting on blogs and forums etc to get some backlinks, but Google is showing none of them.

I realise this is a "big ask", but it broke my heart this morning when I saw how far I had dropped down Google and any advice at all is really appreciated!

I'd also love to hear any comments about the site itself, good or bad, because I really need to improve it, quickly!

My site is at http://www.paintedbylight.co.uk , and please bear in mind that it is for a mid-priced, reportage wedding photographer.

Thanks for any help, in advance.........

Zero text Flash, I'd say the first four months were the accident.

Yes SE's index Flash -- for text. You added nothing new: Each HTML container has the exact same Flash object.

Essentially duplicate content.

Dropping to 31st page is merely the beginning. Your single Flash object is being seen by the search engine bots as one page. You have run into the trap with Flash -- it's being indexed -- as all one page.

You can't optimize like that. You need real, full HTML with a decent amount of copy. And different flash objects for each page. A hybrid site can work. What you're doing won't.

And don't try the identical text with different keywords either.

Scads of people have pronounced themselves king of the search engines a month in. Come back in a year and we'll see where you really settle out. With so little text you are in for a huge amount of heartbreak. I don't care what bill of goods you were sold -- SEs like plain old text and not Flash.

I would have to agree with DC...sorry. Wrote a blog post about this tonight:
Google SEO Flash Tips/Techniques

Anyways,
i DO love your color choice and your photography is nice.

Here are some Suggestions:
#1 - Get rid of flash, your obviously harming your search engine position and everything you are doing can be done without flash - lookup jquery
#2 - The space between menu items is to big
#3 - I actually have to WAIT for the menu to load wen i click a menu item!??! WHY!?!?!?! (it's annoying and would actually lead me to close the window, if i wasnt evaluating your site, i would have already closed it)
#4 - You dont sign up for adwords and expect it to make sales for you, your website makes sales for you, so does Page 1 on search engines.

Sorry to hear about your search engine woes - hope business gets better!

This might help:
http://speckyboy.com/2009/06/03/15-a...and-tutorials/

http://www.scottmoniz.com/ps
Hover over the links.
Check out the image cycler (look mah, no flash!)
Look at the load time, no waiting for loading messages.

This is obviously a rough out, and could be tweaked.

I am pretty well versed in html/css, and could help you with your website as well as your SEO if you would like (I write many SEO articles which you can check out at my blog below). If you want, we can negotiate something, feel free to send me a private message, would love to work with you.

If you choose to do it yourself, hope you get the results you are looking for.

Good luck with your business!

Hi! The first thing I want to mention is the tempo of download of your web site - it is too slow to download, to my mind - more than a minute. And the color scheme is porr - why not to combine such colors as black, yellow and light green instead of just black and blue? Or to use all the colors of rainbow in the design - the topic of your site is appropriate for doing this.

Scrap the flash and go for a WordPress blog with a template from these guys:

http://www.press75.com/

I suggested the same thing to a photographer friend of mine.

A few design elements that might help

1) Some details, If you look at steve brooks photography, he has a stunning site with nice details and various shades of grey.

2) Font - Not sure this is the right choice or colour for this type of site, maybe something a bit more classic.

3) Bit slow loading a page

4) Elements not lined up, also centred text isn't that nice to read

5) Excellent photographs!

I find it odd that you ranked for this keyword phrase at all. You have it in none of your meta data or anywhere on the page. How many searches are done for this phrase "Northampton wedding photographer" anyway? I'll wager not many.

just a reply tot eh poster above.

search for 'click here' ...#1=adobe, do a view source, there are NO click here on the site. why are they ranked #1?
Imagine the number of sites that say <a href="http://adobe.com">Click here to get flash</a> Backlinks play a big part in your SEO rankings
#2 "northampton wedding photographer" ....this is a great phrase...why would you want to rank #1 for wedding photographer, but say you get 20,000 hits from it...but theyre all from africa....who cares you got 20,000 hits, none of them are going to hire you. northampton wedding photographer might bring him 200 hits , but out of those 200 a high amount are actually lookign for his service and he is in their area

Is there a difference between page 9 and page 31?

"If it's not page one, it's time to move on"

My new moto

agreed. but you wont show up on page 1 right away. if you will, then your either really good or really black hat.

a lot of my keywords show up within the first 9pages, then i pick a few and concentrate on gettin those to page 1, then pick another few and concentrate on those