Search Engines || Information Architecture

Someone asked me last week to give some advice for a digital artist trying to promote himself on the net. It is a pretty interesting case, because is that annoying case for every SEO guy where a client with almost no content wants to score high on competitive strings.

So, we are talking here about a website composed of a few image galleries and a link exchange page and the following characteristics:

• Only main page indexed by google
• No image in Google images
• Main page has links to the rest of the site in JavaScript
• Main page has spam text with font size of size -7

First step:

In the first step is needed to clean up the site and make it search engine friendly.

• clear spam
• make normal links instead of JavaScript’s ones
• research keywords using Good Keywords(freeware) and build meta keywords and then build unique meta description tags for each page
• make unique titles for each page
• make descriptive URLs for galleries
• put ALT on images and link them to the bigger images.
• use proper formating on page: h1 tags for Gallery titles, text links for images with descriptive titles, use if appropriate strong and em tags

Second step:

The client MUST understand that especially on his particular case, counting solely on Google is a bad business model and he needs traffic, targeted traffic that will convert in customers and reviewers. Usually when you try to explain this they leave and usually get stuck with some black hat seo that will quickly rank him for about 1 week only to bury him forever.

If they are still around when you are done with explanations you can proceed to the next step.

Third step:

If the client understood that at least in the beginning Google is a lost cause you will need to give him alternatives. Those are:

• exposure
• blogosphere
• social bookmarking sites
• Google images *

* I know that in the second step I said that Google is not the solution but I was talking mainly about regular results. In this particular case, Google images can be an achievable target on short term

Tommorow I will give details on the third step. Feedback and discussions welcome and encouraged