Generating Traffic

[Aperture]

Hi, I am having trouble generating traffic to my personal website. I am working on getting my site to show up in search engines more despite my site being ran on images. ( ) On that note, is there anything I can do to gain more traffic? What do you guys do in situations like this? I've posted a screenshot of my site stats.

Kevin

PS: The site was launched in May, to explain the 0s.

 

[iMeowbot]

One quick change you can make is to start making use of the alt attribute in your images. That will give search engines something to work with, and it will also make your site usable by many more people. Every image that contains text or something that can be described (backgrounds can be ignored of course) should have that text mirrored in the alt.

 

[xoreu]

Your site contains almost no text (even the text that is there is on images), so the search engines have nothing to index there. It might as well be a blank page, for all they care.
It's not necessary, of course, to redesign your site: adding text to the alt attribute of your images (as mentioned above) is one way of dealing with this.

You might also want to add a good title and some keywords to your home page - it can, perhaps surprisingly, do a lot.

 

[ChrisA]

To score higher you need to get other sites to link to your site. The search engines rate your site based on the number of high rated sites that point to it. (No, you can't simply make a number of dummy sites that point to yours, they are on to that trick.) so what you need is content that people will want to link to. That means you need content that a lot of people want to see. One idea is articles that address common questions that photographers ask. Have a section of opinion, tutorials and reviews. Maybe you talk about composition and color and point to your images as examples. People may notice and tell each other about your site and eentual you might move up from page 10,000 closer to the top.

 

[londonweb]

This is going to sound like a very negative thing to say, but you might as well just stop worrying about it, given the nature of your site. I do a lot of sites for photographers and they always say to me that they want to do really well on Google. My response is generally along these lines:

No-one is going to book your services by typing in 'Fashion photographer' (for example) into google and then somehow finding your website and calling you up. If you type in 'Fashion Photographer' you will most likely get articles about fashion, articles about famous photographers, tutorials on photography, links to buy fashion and/or photographs on ebay, etc. etc. Unless you load your site with quality html-based info about photography and fashion, and get a load of other sites to link to it based on the context of that information, your site is going to come no-where in the listings. The best you can hope for is that your site will appear when someone types in your name, and even that can be hard to achieve. If you want to generate more business, as is presumably the point of having a portfolio site, your best bet is to get some cards printed up and mail them out with the web address to potential clients. Posting a web site and waiting for the work to roll in isn't going to work.

Also, 300+ visits per month is actually very good for a portfolio site that's only been up since May. My advice would be to leave it as it is and concentrate on other means of promotion.

 

[dpaanlka]

To give you some inspiration, I launched my site last November (wow its been a year already!). I worked hard promoting it, creating great content, and generating interest.

I have moved up and up over time through the Google rankings for "System 7" to the point where my site is now the sixth result (yay I'm on the first page!). This in itself is an amazing feat, for such a generic term as "System 7" I can't believe I have a first page result. Not only that, the third result (Wikipedia's article on System 7) actually links to my site. Now I have to beat out Wikipedia, and some crappy techno/punk rock band for the top spot! My work is cut out for me!

Anyways, it can be done, takes some work. You really need a lot more text content, though. This is the bread and butter of search engines (since they can't *see* text that is inside an image).

 

[billyboy]

I would concur about beefing up your content. Could you get other writers to write a review of your site or of a collection of photos or one fave photo?

Have you got a spot on flickr? That is a good source for networking. Post some shots in oyur set, join other groups. Then add one of your own photos to a group say once a week with some explanatory text that gets people excited about what it is, why you like it, what else you have like that etc.
(That's what I have been doing for the Pisstakers and I can see traffic building slowly from that source and we arent photographers.)

Also what did you do to get that spike? Can you replicate it?

 

[dornoforpyros]

I gotta wonder why this is a concern for you? I mean I check my stats occasionally but being that it's a portfolio site I don't really expect it to be a place that people are going to visit more than a few times. I see it more as a way to promote myself to potential employers/clients after I've made initial contact.

But as other have stated, if you insist on using text for images (I'm not going to bother reiterating why this is a bad idea) then I think low SEO ratings are the trade off.