X3Photo Gallery Forums

1. SEO / Google is a chapter of its own, and in most cases you wont really have any chance of showing up with generic terms of real English word combinations, unless the search phrase for example contains your name "Ben Woodham". I checked your site, and I noticed you have the TITLE Basically, TITLE is the most part of your search engine optimization. Its mainly the part where google indexes what you are all about. As long as it only contains your name, Google will does not know much more about your site. I would extend the title to 30-60 characters. For example Then Google will eventually pick up on these words also.

As for the two other settings:
Description
This item doesnt benefit your SEO in any way at google. The only thing it does, is provide a description to human readers when they DO find your site in google. It will display in your google listing item.

Keywords
This I wouldnt even bother using any more. Google does not use this to rank web sites. It was only used by older search engines (and maybe a few non-popular ones).

Basically, your TITLE is important, and then you should get some incoming links. Other than this, your search engine optimization is a little limited with a gallery.

2. Basically, there is a file "favicon.ico" in the root of your gallery. You can delete this file so it wont show up, or you will need a program to create a favicon for you. I found a few simple online tools for creating favicons here:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
http://www.favicon.cc/
http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/
http://www.rw-designer.com/online_icon_maker.php

You can either upload an image and have it converted to ICO, or you can draw your own.

3. When you say hyperlinks, do you mean external links in the main menu, or links in some of your descriptions? If you have external links in your main menu, you can make them open in a new _BLANK window by adding the link with *_target behind it. For example: If you want normal description links to open in new window, you can normally do that with the WYSIWIG editor, but if you add manually, just use the target attribute:

Thats mainly because the html version has more text information about your gallery than the flash version. Like I said, you need to fix your TITLE because right now it only said "Ben Woodham" in your title for the flash gallery. For the html gallery there was additional text ... For example "Ben woodhams art", it will locate the html page unfortunately ...

You should target at getting visitors to your startpage, where the flash gallery is. You cant be targeting to many keywords and phrases for that, or else google will pick subpages.

You could of course disable the html version, but I dont really see any functional value with that.

Well, unfortunately, google is a complex animal that you cannot tame. Let me explain a few things >

# Except for "Ben+Woodham" keywords, you are hardly related to those other keywords. If you try searching them, you will not be listed basically because there are millions of other sites competing for the same keywords.

# If you just changed your title, it may take several weeks before Google updates its index to reflect your changes in title. Mostly because you have a new website.

# In addition to the TITLE, there is one main important factor for google to decide how high it rates you compared to your keywords: Incoming links. The more important, phrase-related links you have from related sites, the more weight your website will bear.

# "Ben Woodhams bird" will probably eventually link to your home page after Google re-indexes your website-

# Unfortunately since Imagevue is valued relatively high at google, and you have a new website, you may easily find "woodhams illustration" going to for example the imagevue forum. This may change after they re-index your site based on your new title, where you added "illustration".

# "Ben woodhams website" will probably change to point towards your site once google re-indexes your title.

This is just how google works. It uses an arsenal of advanced algorithms to find the website page which is most valuable to the visitors search. For example, if there is a forum page discussing "ben woodhams illustration" in detail, google may think this is the best page to show visitors searching for "ben woodham illustration". We know it is not, but in many cases it could have been.

I am a bit unsure why it is important for you in terms of the search engines at this point. Your users should be able to find benwoodhams.com no? I mean, if they are looking for your site, they may A) Type in your name, and add .com or B) They have it from a business card or C) Search your name in Google and find it on #1 anyway. I dont see many people searching "ben woodham illustrations" - That would be like searching "barack obama president". Search for isolated generic terms like "illustration" will not yield any results for you ...

Oh just another suggestion: Why not make a signature in this forum (like I have with some links) and simply add your website with text like this:
Ben Woodhams: bird art and illustrations

Not only will your link raise your related rank with google, but since you are linking to your root flash page and not the html page or some other page, google will increasingly show this page in search instead.