What are you doing/using for site optimization?

a web designer that does work for google... :-)

Man, that's just.... well that's not even fair, man
Anyone else??

Are you talking about SEO? So you come up high on searches?

1) Make sure your site has html text with the key words you want search engines to find. Metatags don't work well. Text colored the same color as your background won't fool the search bots.

2) Get links to your site EVERYWHERE YOU CAN. Other blogs are good. Just comment on others' blogs and leave your site address. Blog links are good & easy, but it's better to get links to your site from BIGGER sites. Media sites (tv, news, radio) or well-known sites. The "bigger" the site that has your link, the more "points" that gets you from the search bots.

What you are asking is akin to calculating a credit score.

#1 There are many different search engines - Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask (and there are others that are upcoming)...
#2 Each uses a different method to determine your ranking

Personally, I'm not concerned about SEO on a day to day basis - it fluctuates like the stock market. Instead I've read the guidelines each search engine publishes, and I try to incorporate them as much as I can into the site.

Everyday I check my statcounter reports, and by FAR, the most common phrase people use to find me is my own name. This tells me that word of mouth marketing is working for me, and that people hear about me and want to see more.

Hi Michael, I went to your website and didn't see a link to your blog.
If you don't have one start a free with any of the services and start blogging. Include relevant information about what your post, if you're posting a wedding make sure to include links and details about the venue, other vendors, location, etc. that will help you tremendously.
80% of potential clients that find me online find my blog first... my website is now secondary.

80%!?!??! Wow!
I just started my blog. http://www.mandrewsphotography.blogspot.com/
I haven't figured out how to get my blog link on my BigFolio site yet.
Nor have I figured out how to get a pic larger than bloggers "standard" size.
My site is flash, so html is irrelevant, isn't it?
At present, my site does get ANY traffic unless someone was actually looking for it or found my link on WPJA. So I gues that would be like living in the stone ages or something and defeats the purpose of having a web site (well, at least some of the purpose).

This is weird--I don't think I have ever replied to my own post.
I now have a link to my blog on my web site
I'm still wondering abou my other questions though. Anyone?

semi-shameless bump

A friend of mine is a web designer that works for Google.

Starting a blog and posting regularly helps a lot. If you have the time, learn how to install Wordpress on your server. It's free and there are a lot of great (and free) plugins for Wordpress that help with SEO.

Also, look for sites to exchange links with. You can do a google search for relevant keywords that you'd like to be associated with and see if they have any sort of link exchange that you can trade links with.

The flash sites are definitely no good in terms of SEO. Your blog can compensate for that or you can create a "mirror" site in HTML that mirrors the text and/or look of your flash site. Of course, no one would navigate the HTML version of the site, but the search engine bots will and be able to read the text (they aren't able to read flash).

That's a good starting point. You can also look up 'seo' or 'search engine optimization' and learn a lot as well

Cheers!
Peter

This is something I've been working on for the past several months, and I might be able to give you a different perspective on the subject. What everyone so far has said is valid, good advice, but there's a little more to it.
You do definitely need to join a link exchange. OSP has one. Look in the marketing section. It makes a huge difference. Gavin Seim (also on OSP) has a link exchange, too. I would join both of them. When I started reading up on SEO (about 9 - 10 months ago), I wasn't even in the top 1000 search results for my chosen search terms ("Augusta GA Wedding Photographer"). Just joining the link exchanges brought me up to the 30 - 40 range within about 2 weeks. Getting from there to a consistent number 1 spot took a few more months of trial and error.
The first thing that I learned is that the googlebot cannot see pictures or flash movies. Google can only see text. You must tell google what you want it to know about you. If you want people to find you on google when they type in the words "fanciest wedding photographer in the whole world", then you must use those words somewhere on your site, and repeat them many times over. Choose a list of words that you think people should be using to find you. Mine goes something like this: Brian Moore Photography Augusta GA Georgia Photographer Professional Portrait Wedding Bridal Engagement.....You get the picture. Text that is inside a picture or flash movie is worthless, because it will never be seen. At first, I thought that meant I had to put a lot of text on my pages. That's not true. I've found 7 different places that google can see text, and they are all important. If you're overlooking any of these, change them and see what a difference it makes.
1. The names of your pages. This is what's in the blue bar at the top of the page. If it says "Welcome to Michael Andrews Photography", then you're wasting valuable space, because no one is going to find you with the word "welcome".
2. The file names/URL's of your different pages. If you have a page called "www.mandrewsphotography.com/view_proofs/", then you are wasting valuable space. You could call it "www.mandrewsphotography.com/tampa_wedding/" (not necessarily "tampa", but I don't know where you live), and it would help you considerably. People aren't going to be typing in these kinds of urls anyway, they will be following a link, so who cares what it's called?
3. File names for pics and flash movies. If you have a JPEG on your site called "Suzanne001.jpg", then.....you guessed it, you're wasting valuable space.
Name the picture "vermont-photographer.jpg" or something like that.
4. Alt tags for your pics. If you use your alt tags to describe the pictures, like "Suzanne holding the new puppy", that's not helping you. Use your search terms.
5. You need to list all of your terms in the "keywords" section of your html code for each page.
6. Also, use the "description" section of the code to desribe your website, but be sure to put the most important search words in there.
7. Page text. When you're blogging, be sure to use those words on a regular basis wherever you can.
I hope this helps. If I was unclear about any of it, let me know. It's hard to squeeze all of my trial and error into one post.

http://elevationblog.com/2007/10/6/suckers

now that's a good blog.