BluDomain SEO Review for Flash Templates and HTML Sites

For photography websites that use BluDomain, the tips provided in the Photographer’s SEO Book will help you get a little more out of your search engine optimization efforts. This post talks a little bit about what SEO options already come with BluDomain templates.

If you are not familiar, BluDomain is a web service that offers website templates for photographers from $50 to $400. You choose one of many many different designs that are already coded, and simply upload your own logo, information, and photos. I think it is the most professional and easiest way to get a website up and running quickly so that you can focus on photography instead of web design (and without hiring a web developer).

Here are some of the SEO features offered by BluDomain photography sites:

• Section for meta data
• Splash page option
• HTML site option
• Miniblog

BluDomain Meta Data

BluDomain’s admin panel has an easy to access section for “edit meta tags” that allow photographers to enter site title, site description, and site keywords. This is a nice feature for less-technical folks who are not familiar with editing html code.

BluDomain Meta Data Screen

This meta data is applied to all pages of the site – so you cannot customize each page to have unique page title, meta description, and meta keywords like you would when traditionally implementing search improvements. On the other hand, most experts think that meta data is becoming less important for Google’s search ranking algorithm.

Read my other post about choosing the right meta data.

BluDomain Splash Pages

If your website is animated or built in Flash you absolutely must use a splash page in order to rank in search engines, because it is the only place where you can use html (non-Flash) texts that search engines can read. BluDomain allows a splash page for most if not all of its templates. This is an introductory HTML page that provides the main description and navigation to the rest of your website. Example:

Sample Splash Page for BluDomain

Explanation: Google returns the best results by looking at what a user typed into search, then finding webpages that use those same words. It looks for these words in a number of places on the webpage:

• The URL of your site (domain name)
• Your site title
• The text words on your site

Now we know that when a user searches for something like “San Diego wedding photographer” Google looks for web pages with the same words. By using those words on my page in the above locations, I’m telling Google “my page is about the same thing – the search user is looking for my website!” This keyword comparison accounts for about 25% of Google’s matching process.

The more times you show Google that it’s a match (uses the same keywords as the user searched), the higher you can show in search results. Therefore your splash page has to have text, ideally 200 words or more and use a portion of your key phrase a number of times.

BluDomain HTML Site Option

I don’t think it is necessary to choose a BluDomain template that has an HTML option simply for search purposes. Here’s why… after using the Photographers SEO Book to get multiple #1 ranks for her area, Sacramento portrait photographer Jill Carmel sent me her keyword list of over 50 keyword combinations that she she ranked for. When I looked all of these up (using a quick tool called Rank Checker) I quickly saw that only 2 of the 50 were HTML versions of her site that ranked in search. Meaning, even with a well optimized site, HTML pages within BluDomain are not ranking well.

The HTML version would make it more likely for your sub pages to rank in search engines, but only for moderate to expert SEO effort. Expert SEO photographers are probably not using a template service for their website to begin with. So for the beginning SEO photographer, there is not enough text on your sub pages to make it worth displaying that text in HTML format, which search engines can read, instead of Flash format which search engines can’t typically see.

Bottom line: I have yet to find a BluDomain template that is better than another for SEO purposes. As long as you use a splash page, you are fine.

BluDomain MiniBlog

I’ve been reading about a new BluDomain product called the mini blog. Without knowing too much about it, I can say that the best positioned blogs in SEO have lots of text and give you complete control over URLs and titles of your posts, as well as categories and keywords for each post. Plus they have integrated sitemaps, create their own links to your posts from its main pages, and are indexed very frequently. I think anyone will tell you WordPress is the best platform for blogging if you want to rank in search engines easily and quickly – its what I use and has all of those features. I’m thinking BluDomain blogs are probably great for photos and look great too, but may lack in SEO ability.

Tagged as: bludomain, review, website templates