Showit SEO: Search Review for Web Sites, Display & Slideshows

SEO for Showit will allow you to search engine optimize (SEO) your photographer website so that it can hopefully appear higher in Google and therefore attract more new clients. Showit websites provide professional and beautiful Flash web sites perfectly suited for photography. Don’t let the Flash aspect fool you – these sites can rank in search, and Showit has a large number of standard SEO features to help you in your quest for a high ranking. Take for example Dane Sanders’ Showit site with a PageRank of 6.

If your new to SEO, there are 2 aspects that affect ranking: on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are the ones you can control through your Showit template that I’ll highlight in the post below, like page titles, slideshow and image alt tags, and sitemaps. Off-page factors are outside of your website, most importantly the quality and quantity of links that point to you. If you could simply manipulate your title and meta tags (on-page factors) and rank well, then everybody would be ranked 1 in Google. That’s where my Photographers SEO Book will help your Showit SEO efforts. It teaches you how to craft the right text and get the best links to your website in the fastest and easiest to understand possible way. Pickup your copy now for just $39.

Showit Page Title Control

Your page title is arguably the most important element of the webpage that you can control for search purposes. Showit allows you to control a sitewide title which can appear either before or after your page level title. For example the title of my gallery page can appear as “My Site Name – My Page Name” or My Page Name – My Site Name” and you also have a couple choices for the dash in the middle. I would prefer to have the site name completely removed from the subpages, but appreciate the ability to write a page title that can be whatever I want. Many other website systems only offer access to one title that appears on all pages, or a title that can only be the same text as your gallery name (for example). Users can also default to sitewide settings if they do not want to create a unique title for each page. Below is an example of how easy it is to manipulate the title in the Showit system, and you can see the “Page” tab for updating page-specific titles.

Showit SEO Screen

Meta and Page Descriptions

As you saw in the screenshot above, Showit has a description field as well. On the SEO tab this acts as a meta description that will show with your search description as a reason for users to click your search result. Although meta descriptions no longer help you rank higher, they are important for converting users to click through your link and are therefore important.

At the page level you can use the description field to place html text into the page code that can be seen by search engines. This text supplements Flash on the page that Google cannot see, thus is very important for any Showit owner to take advantage of. Even a short description on each page is enough for Google to understand what your page is about. No need to load keywords here – a straightforward description of the page will suffice and if you can sprinkle in a phrase or two that users may search for then that is great. HTML is allowed, so if you are following along in my ebook then this is a good spot to add an H1 tags or links.

SiteMap

Showit automatically creates an XML sitemap of all your pages within your site and offers a button to submit it directly to Google in case you don’t want to wait for Google to find it.

Showit Sitemap Publish Screen

I think this is the reason Showit can market that its websites are 100% indexed by web crawlers. You can quickly confirm this statement to be true by typing site:domainname.com where you replace domainname.com with the name of a Showit website. Perhaps try this with one of the showcase sites from its websites to see what I mean. You’ll see a list of all the pages that Google has indexed for that site, and there will be plenty. The automatic sitemap feature can help when trying to get your subpages ranked, liked a specific gallery, and gives Showit an SEO edge over a couple of its competitors.

URL Control

I think Google’s second most important place for keywords is the URL and filenames of your pages. The site settings offer easy control over your domain name so that you can control your domain name, subdomains, etc. But the better feature comes in that each page has its own URL. That means you can link to an individual subpage (like a gallery) and that page can also rank in Google. More pages can loosely translate to more chances to rank in Google if you are targeting different keywords. Many other flash-based sites maintain one URL through the entire site, which never changes as the user navigates, which can be frustrating for users and search engines.

Showit URLs have a couple of minor drawbacks. They are far outweighed by the URL benefits, but I thought it necessary to point them out. First is that subpages are placed at the top folder level, so your URLs would look like showitsite.com/folder1 and showitsite.com/folder2 and you could not ever create a directory hierarchy like showitsite.com/folder1/folder2. The other is that sometimes a hash sign is placed in the URL and sometimes not, depending on where the user came from, for example showitsite.com/#/folder1. This can dilute your link equity if you have users linking to one form of the URL but you want them linking to another. Even though it is really the same page, Google sees each URL as unique and ranks them separately.

It is true that you generally don’t want to link to the URL with the # in it, so you can get your html link by right clicking on the page while inside Showit and get a more web friendly HTML URL.

Page Text

Users don’t see much text on the website pages, something many photographers probably enjoy because it keeps the design clean, professional, and focused on the imagery. For search purposes the text still appears within the HTML code and is visible by Google. This text can be controlled easily from page to page in the Showit system via the text layers feature. The layers allow code like H1 tags as well that search weigh more heavily for your most important keywords. So you can describe a photo gallery page with a couple paragraphs of SEO-rich text to help search understand what your gallery is about, and this text will not appear on the page.

Similarly there is a layer for image texts that will display in the code as alt attributes and can be very important to helping Google understand what your images are about. So even in a flash-based website, Showit provides a full HTML version of your website that is indexed and readable by search engines. Using the “SEO” button on the Showit stage you even have the opportunity to customize what components of your site you want to appear in the HTML view. For example you can do a Google search for Presentation0046 and see that the first result is a Showit site where the site owner used Presentation0046 as the alt tag for one of his images. I use that very specific (and irrelevant) keyword only to demonstrate that search engines use alt tags in its rankings, Showit makes this feature available, and you should therefore choose your image texts wisely!

The legal/copyright line also offers an opportunity for custom HTML text and links on the page – a great place for an extra keyword-rich phrase.

Miscellaneous Features

Alt tags – you can control the alt text of images by editing the layer text of the images that appear in the Flash. These alt tags appear in the HTML version of the site.

Snapshots – for users who have difficulty viewing Flash (like an iPhone) Showit provides the ability to take screen captures of your pages and present the page as a single image view.

Google Analytics integration – after you setup your free Google Analytics web stats account (not difficult, but there is a step-by-step guide in the Photographers SEO Book) then you easily enter your Analytics ID into your Site Settings area to start tracking information like which keywords sent you traffic from search or which other websites sent you the most visitors.

Zach recommends Showit Sites Free Version – Great for Checking out SEO Features

Tagged as: Reviews, showit, website templates