Do I have to optimize every page on my site?
-
Hi guys I run my own photography webstie (www.hemeravisuals.co.uk Going through the process optimizing my page for seo. I have one question I have a few gallery pages with no text etc? Do I still have to optimize these ? Would it rank my site lower if they weren't optimized?
And how can i do this sucessfully with little text on these pages ( I have indepth text on these subjects on my services & pricing pages?
Kind Regards
Cam
-
Hi there! Yes, you've definitely received some great responses! If your question has been answered, please mark up to three responses as a "Good Answer" and mark this question answered. Thanks!!
Christy
-
Would just like to say a big thanks for everyones input here has gave me alot of food for thought and also alot more to do
haha
Thanks again !
-
I would optimize the pages that you want to drive traffic to for keywords that are naturally relevant to each page. Never stuff a page with keywords (use your gut to determine the right amount) and always write copy so that it is completely readable and not awkward for your visitors. I would also avoid creating multiple pages just for the sake of targeting similar keywords with no other purpose (e.g. you have a page that targets "red apple" and a page that targets "red apples"). I've seen sites get smacked by Google Panda for doing this.
Sites with poorly-written SEO copy seem spammy and will be an instant turn off to whoever's showed up at your virtual doorstep.
Pages such as Contact Us and About Us don't really need optimization per se. However, all pages should at least contain unique and relevant h1s, meta titles and descriptions. Also, always avoid duplicating text between pages. This helps your website be more search engine friendly. I find that the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Google's Webmaster Tools HTML Suggestions are great for diagnosing which pages on your site need these unique elements.
-
Some great answers people thanks very much Smart Cow what did you mean when you said
''That said there are always things to improve Have a look at H1 and H2 settings you have on the home page.'' What have I done wrong ?
Cheers Cam
-
Good Morning!
Google is about content, and SEO is more and more about marketing.
Optimizing is important of course, but even Matt Cutts said it wouldn't be worth your time to go back and optimize old pages that were not optimized. That being said, I personally feel that optimizing the gallery as far as the meta tags are concerned as was mentioned above is more than enough.
If you have the time to go back and optimize everything, it certainly will not hurt to do it. However, if you have limited resources, I think you are better off writing blog posts about images that are in your own gallery, developing your Google authorship, etc.
Google wants content. Show Google you are an Expert, Trustworthy, and an Authority (EAT) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2355230/google-search-quality-guidelines-now-reward-expertise-authority-trust
-
Generally, optimizing a page means that you are targeting a specific key term you want to rank for. While you might not see measurable "negative" SEO effects of having pages with no content, I believe that you could use those pages to target key terms. Images rank as well as pages. You can use image alt attributes and add some content to those pages which may help drive some traffic. I like to play safe rather than sorry. It takes a little bit of work, and you might not have keywords for those pages yet, but you could use the images as ranking tools.
-
There are many level to ensuring your site is optimised that is not just text on the page. Page load speed, page name and page bounce must all surely play a factor. This is a nice site that engages with nice images and not ruined by extra text to try an please a search engine.
For keyword content, keep your blog up-to-date with honest genuine content, maybe pointing to a gallery when you update the images.
As far as I can see SEO will become (is becoming) something that reflects good honest and engaging content rather than making sure you have scientifically optimised your site.
Show your passion for your subject and it will be rewarded with visitors interested in your service and products. Try to second guess and over optimise a site and you will be found out , maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually.
That said there are always things to improve Have a look at H1 and H2 settings you have on the home page.
Also notice at the top I did not say it was a quick site have a looks at speeding this up http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141126_61_VQT/ people may bounce away even before viewing your page whatever the great keywords you may have optimised with.
Just my 2 pennies worth, hope it helps
-
I see you got a answer from someone that knows more than me. I recommend that you take Kevin's advice, and apologize for my bad advice.
-
There are many ways to optimize gallery pages (optimize H tags, optimizing file size of images, adding short descriptions, good page titles, implementing proper tags on the image, good ux and so on). There is an excellent tutorial here. Good luck!
-
Disclaimer: I am definitely not a SEO expert, but i cannot see any reason for why you should get penalized for having a few gallery pages on your site. That would just give people another reason for doing "bad" SEO by using shady methods to get their gallery-pages and similar pages with no/minimal text to rank better.
-
Thanks very much ! I had wondered this and wasn't entirely sure how the page rank worked in terms of optimization on every page. As I have 4 Gallery Pages & 1 Home Page for the Galleries 'hemeravisuals.co.uk/galleries/weddings. But that makes sense really enjoying moz feeling i'm finally getting to grips with this SEO !
-
Yes, you can have unoptimized pages. They will naturally not get a very good pagerank, but as far as i know it does not hurt to have some pages with no text as long as you have enough content on the rest of your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements Page Blank / Site Not Ranking Well
I have an ecommerce site that is not ranking well currently. It has about 1,000 pages indexed in Google but very few appear to be ranking. I normally find issues in Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements but for some reason it does not see a problem with the site. There are problems, trust me. Moz shows many issues. Google nothing! There is a problem somewhere but I am not seeing it. Why are HTML Improvements blank and the site not ranking? Am I in the dreaded sandbox? Any ideas? Sean We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optin0 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0 -
How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized
I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com). Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance). My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either. Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this? Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0 -
How to best utilize network of 50 sites to increase traffic on main site
Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0