A friend recently constructed a great website for me, namely www.ben-mcgarry.com
Unfortunately, he’s a little out of action at present and not able to provide support. He’s the IT brain behind the business, and I’m simply the content creative. As such, I’m encountering problems, especially since learning - from objective outsiders - that there are identified issues with keywords, which is going to affect my SEO (all of which are new terms to me).
I’ve signed up for a Webmasters account, and the statistics are poor. The website was launched last year, and I basically have little to no traffic. I don’t expect to be on page one of Google, as travel blogs and websites are highly competitive, but my articles are not even ranking on page 40, and sometimes not at all! There are technical issues, ones I don’t really understand or know how to fix.
I’m not asking anyone to resolve the issue for me, but I’d really appreciate feedback - or recommendations - regarding someone who could. It’s out of Webflow’s statement of support I understand.
Any feedback you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your reply, although it doesn’t really address anything I’ve asked, particularly the part about me not being an IT expert and asking for a referral.
However, taking your point into consideration, it’s going to be hard to achieve. If I compress photographs any further, they lose all quality and it defeats the purpose of having a ‘travel and photography’ website altogether. I cannot boast being a photographer if my images are end up displaying as poor quality.
Hi Ben. I know you wanted help with SEO but I wanted to help with file sizes anyway =)
I took one of your images, 2.2 mb in file size and ran trough JPEGMini(for Mac) and saved 58% in size down to under 1 mb.
Here´s the new image 58c75ea9a26caa7f74ce7fc5_IM...
See if you could live with quality loss, if you can see any =D
Thank you for taking the time and applying the effort to demonstrate this. You’re right, there’s no difference in regards to this image. I am happy to drop down the resolution on the higher quality and new images. However, I did this when I first started the website and, when increased to full page size - as many of them are - they blurred completely.
I’ll go through and drop the bigger ones down, ideally to around 1mb in size.
Thank you for the great tip.
I apologise for sounding obnoxious earlier; it wasn’t intended to mean anything personally. It’s been a challenging year trying to achieve some sort of Google status, and I’m at my wits end.
@Ben-McGarry Hey Ben! First of all, love the site. For the SEO, I definitely see some issues that would affect your ranking. Some issues are
1.) META Descriptions. This is a description of ~155 characters that gives Google a summary of your page. Every page on your site should have a unique META description
2.) OG tags. These are similar to meta descriptions but are specifically for social media
3.) canonical link tag. This tells search engines that your site is the same whether someone goes there from http:// , https:// , www. , or your naked domain (without www)
4.) Many of your images are missing alt tags. This is how search engines know what your image is of, and thus can display your page when people search those terms
5.) Not sure if you have a “business” per se, but it greatly helps your SEO if you register your business with Google (Google Business Profile - Get Listed on Google) , and also create a linkedin business page
6.) A huge factor going off the above, is if you have ratings on various services (google reviews, yelp, etc)
This is what I’ve seen just off a first glance. If you’d like any help, have further questions, or would like me to dig deeper, feel free to DM me. Cheers!
You would also benefit from well-crafted meta descriptions on your pages, you can easily do that by clicking on the page settings icon and filling those empty fields with relevant content.
Not only that, trading quality backlinks from your competitors and related sites will also boost your site’s reputation, so you might want to get your website’s link out there, or advertise with Google Adwords.
Your feedback is tremendous, thank you! I thought there were things wrong, based on feedback I’d received, but didn’t realise how much. I’m sure there are more things that can be fixed, based on earlier replies from other forum members and my hunches.
I will send you a PM shortly to get advice about a way forward.
