Working on this site...

[callmeed]

and wondering what is wrong in terms of on page SEO (basically just want some feedback on tips/changes to make) http://www.stevenholmesstudio.com/  I'm assuming that the title shouldn't be just the img file name..any suggestions for what it should be?

[danatanseo]

My first suggestion would to take the site, which appears to be 100% flash-based, and put the flash in an HTML wrapper. Search engines cannot crawl 100% flash sites very well at all. It's going to be hard to get the saite to rank wellI would do that before starting to do anything else. Once that's done, go to work on optimizing page titles. Refrain from using all caps. A good title for the homepage of this site (once it's in an HTML wrapper) might be:

Steven Holmes Studio Photography

If you look at the site in google by typing site:http://www.stevenholmesstudio.com in the search box, you'll see that Google is indexing the individual images (but not very well), but not really any of the content. An HTML wrapper should fix that. All of the images also need "alt" text describing the photos for accessibility reasons (people who are using screen readers, etc).

Hope that's helpful!

[callmeed]

Hi Dana -

are you looking at it on IE? A flash version is shown to IE Versions since those aren't super great on HTML 5 features.

any chance you could look at it on firefox and look at the title while in a gallery on an image.

thanks for your feedback.

[GeorgeAndrews]

You are correct. You shouldn't be using just the IMG filename for the page title.

One suggestion would be to add alt attributes to your images and use the alt text to populate your titles. The alt text would describe the image it is attached to.

Another suggestion would be to come up with a title for each picture, but still provide an alt attribute with descriptive text and then use the alt text to populate the meta description tag instead. I prefer this one, but it requires more work.

I see you are using HTML5 to produce the same effects provided by the Flash site. I'm not as familiar with HTML5 as I should be, but a lot of your markup doesn't lend to helping crawlers so maybe updating your markup would help. What I mean is: your JavaScript spills out into the bottom of your HTML document and could be included in an external ".js" file. This would help clean up the HTML some. The same is true for your CSS.

One final note: you don't need to use the meta keywords tag any longer if you don't want to. Also, all of your page descriptions are the same for all of your HTML5 pages. You are using a canonical link to your home page, but if you could use different descriptions once you get your title tag issue figured out I believe it will help your pages when indexed individually.

[MattAntonino]

Hey Erik!

Basically the way the page is created causes major issues.

On http://www.stevenholmesstudio.com - you have the About (and other) page texts.  "Steven Holmes is a commercial photographer, videographer and musician, specializing in studio and environmental portraiture, short-form documentary video and music for picture."

The "About page" has the exact same text.  The site is very limited on text but it's all repeated on the individual pages.

I agree with George about the .js file as well.

~MattA

[danatanseo]

Hi Erik,

Yes, you were correct. I was in IE. Ah, yes, in Firefox, much better, but George's comments below are very good. I would definitely follow his advice. Good luck!

Dana