Professional wedding photographer, Ryan Graham of Cape Town, South Africa, got in touch recently to say that his Google ranking had suffered significantly recently despite good keywords being present on his site. Worried about his position in search engine results pages (SERPs) Ryan was seeking someone who could identify any issue(s) with his website and rectify the problem.

As any SEO professional will tell you, it is rarely just one factor contributing to a problem, and a holistic view must be taken of the site's on and off page qualities before any drastic action is taken.

To complicate things slightly Ryan had two websites offering almost identical information in different localities - the main difference was that his primary site was built using Flash (*shudder*). Flash is not the most search-friendly of platforms on which to build a website due to its 'closed' nature to search 'bots, and this was identified as the first point to rectify.

The second problem to rectify was the duplication of the website across two domains, one based on Flash with the other based on HTML - with both sites being run from a platform called Big Folio, which itself clearly wasn't designed with the end user in mind as domain settings, file upload options and on-page content options were limited, if not non-existent.

The plan to get Ryan's website back up to scratch was three-fold:

1. Consolidate both websites onto one search-friendly platform (based on HTML and not Flash!)
2. Organise the two different domain names to resolve to the correct site.
3. Set up 301 redirects and inform Google of the change of domain address via the Webmaster Tools console

In order to improve search potential further the homepage was treated to some body content and a new <h1> tag and Ryan's Blog (also on a separate domain) redirected to the new site domain. Whilst in the zone, Google Analytics tracking code was added in to help Ryan monitor his traffic and improve on his online marketing.

You can see the fruits of Ryan's labour as an award-winning wedding photographer at his website: www.ryangrahamphotography.com