Recent Projects Pages or "gallery" - what are some best practices

[HoosierBuff]

hi all,

I have a garage door company that I am working with, and I want to create new pages for each time they complete an interesting/noteworthy project. The idea is that we would have a page for "Wood style garage door near Carson City" and "Carriage style garage door near reno". Each page would have an image, and I'm thinking a short paragraph, like three sentences about the project.

What are the best practices for this? Right now when I look around I typically see two things that bug me:

1. Just a simple Gallery that was some kind of wordpress theme or plugin, that doesn't create unique pages.

2. Some sites have a "projects" page, but, it has all the projects on one single page. I think they should be on a different page.


What are some of the best practices here. I'm thinking:

1. One page per project
2. 3-5 sentences about the project.
3. Maybe 10-20 projects total
4. Main nav links to a project page, which in turn links to the individual projects (would be hard to have 10-20 links to individual projects).

Or. . . would it be better just to have 5 good recent projects with several paragraphs and more explanatory text.

 

[James Watt]

I've seen something like that work very well for wedding photographers getting organic traffic for venues. From what I've seen, the big winners are the ones with a category page, presumably in part because it means a better internal linking structure going to the central page. You can have your sub pages with some text and a photographer, and a main category page that, among other content, pulls in images and text from new projects that've been tagged appropriately. You could beef up those category pages to be more like a [local landing page](http://www.localsearchforum.com/loc...azing-local-landing-pages-list-them-here.html) in addition to pulling in the content from recent jobs you've made pages for.

With photographers, I've seen an even mix of a specific wedding post ranking for venue keywords, and category pages ranking, but photographers have the benefit of the one-off wedding page generating links on it's own right occasionally, so I think it would be easier to get a main category page ranking given your industry.

 

[HoosierBuff]

James,

Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with what you say - I think having a category page is going to be key. I think I will simply use blog posts, but, then create a category page to link to the blog posts directly.

. . . speaking of weddings, I have a caterer that I work with, and there are SOOO MANY linking opportunities and other things you can do for them. It is a very link rich industry (and many of the biggest companies have poor SEO).

 

[glyphdg]

Hi,

I am working with a couple of caterers right now. Would be interested to learn more about your ideas about how to promote them.

Thanks!