Optimising a Title for three keywords

[keepitafrican]

How do I optimise the title for 3 keywords/phrases?

1) cheetah pictures
2) cheetah photos
3) cheetah stock photography

I'm assuming Google picks up synonyms?

I have had the suggestion of "Quality Cheetah Pictures from Africapic Stock Photography Gallery." Would this incorporate these all?

Anyone else have a thought on this?

Many Thanks

Alex

[DaveWoods]

I'd probably just have "Cheetah Stock Photography Pictures"

[stymiee]

I have had the suggestion of "Quality Cheetah Pictures from Africapic Stock Photography Gallery."

Why would you add words to your title is you are targeting just those three phrases? Keep it simple like above.

[dvduval]

I would pick the strongest of the three for the main page, and then you could find other ways to use the other phrases such as in the text or on other pages.

[keepitafrican]

Great suggestion. I have changed it.

There are so many diverse suggestions on the web, that it all confuses me! I appreciate such a clear cut answer.

As I am a photographer, I have a lot of images on my webpage. Competition for long tail phrases is not too high and I can get ranked well, if I ensure the webpage is right.

I have done a number of changes as recommended by so called SEO people on the web, and have found my rankings drop and pages not get listed! (not from this forum though)

I feel as though there are some experienced people on this forum, after having seen the depth of discussions on some of the threads.

Could someone please have a quick look at one of my picture pages and tell me if there are any gaping erros or faux pas that I have committed since I am really struggling to get Google's favour again. I think that with all the advice, I have put something in that Google dislikes. It is not a complicated page.

I'm obviously optimising for the words in the title.

Many Thanks All

Is there any way I can return the favour? I'd love to help out, but am learning fast about various IT things. I am more on the photographer side of things.

[DaveWoods]

Not sure whether this should really be in the review section so you may find that this topic gets locked but here's a couple of quick suggestions.

TimGaunt_030039 in the <title> means nothing to me as a user and certainly won't mean anything to the search engine's so I'd remove it. Obviously it's the author but it certainly doesn't need to be in the title of the page.

There seems to be a lot of clutter on the page and very little in terms of navigation. A better navigational structure will help the search engines to find all your content whilst also making it easier for your users to find the relevant pictures.

I know you only asked about this one page but the homepage would be of much more concern to me. You're using flash as a means for your main navigation which spider's are unable to follow so all of your content may not be indexed.

This isn't an extensive list and was just a first impressions thought of the site but the main issue will certainly be with the navigation in my opinion.

Make the site easier for users to browse your site and navigate the content and a lot of the hard work associated with search engine optimisation should already be taken care of.

[keepitafrican]

Thanks for the thoughts

With regards to:
"TimGaunt_030039 in the <title> means nothing to me as a user and certainly won't mean anything to the search engine's so I'd remove it. Obviously it's the author but it certainly doesn't need to be in the title of the page."

I have 50 pictures that are called lion. I have added the filename as it is the only certain, simple, unique thing (each photo has unique keywords, and possibly location) about these 50 different pictures, and I want a slight change in the heading to avoid being punished for duplicate content. I also can't really change the filenames. If it wasn't for this, I would not have put it in the title. It was someones suggestion to avoid having 50 identical titles.

Thanks for pointing out the navigational structure. This is an area that I definitely will need some help on. I will post this shortly in a new thread.

What do you mean by "there seems to be a lot of clutter on the page"? I have tried to keep it really simple, but have somehow come short. Do you have any specifics that you could mention?

This is a css generated page. I have 50 photos with the title "Lion", but with different keywords, filenames, locations, etc. I want all pages to be listed in Google and avoid duplicate content.

[DaveWoods]

Why not put something a little more descriptive in the title about what the picture is of? Lion grazing, Lion hunting etc? Using the author name and a random number is going to dilute the weight of your main keyword so you'd be just as well having Lion 1, Lion 2 if that's the approach you were going to take.

The reference to clutter was more to do with the lack of navigation and things being located in different parts of the page. You've got the main nav at the top, breadcrumb's, next and previous links, return to, send to friend, link to sales, usage information links but they seem to be in different parts of the page.

I'd probably take the approach of splitting these into sections so you make a bit better use of the space available. Maybe add a main navigation to the left column which will allow users (and spiders) to easily browse through your content. Supply a submenu either under this or in a third right column which contains links to other bits of information and another box which contains the "shopping cart/add to cart".

These are probably more usability issues so not sure whether you want to ignore these for now as you were obviously asking about SEO but it's all related.

Make things easier for a human to use and the search engines will love it.

Might also be worth taking a look at something like

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clos...php?id=4113840

Notice how they've optimised the title to only contain relevant keywords. They've included a descriptive bit of text within the <h1> which reflects what the lion is doing.

They've also got important navigation in one place and all actions are above or near the fold in columns to prevent the user from having to scroll to discover various actions.

iStockPhoto is by no means perfect. Their browse categories just seems like an advanced search but it should hopefully give you a few ideas.

Hope that helps.

[madaboutu]

you also have to check ‘keyword difficulty’. Popular kw means hard competition.

[neuwill]

I would use "Cheetah Photos & Stock Photography Pictures" a little extension to what CSSwiz said.

[DaveWoods]

I would use "Cheetah Photos & Stock Photography Pictures" a little extension to what CSSwiz said.

Presumably Photo's would be a synonym of Photography whilst using the ampersand would maybe considered a stop word?