Take your photography
website to the top of the search engine results.
Photographers – Optimize Your Websites with these
Free SEO Techniques!
Is your website pulling in customers? Is it making
you any money? It could. Assuming you have quality content on your
site, you can pull in free search engine traffic, and lots of it. If
you implement the steps that I am about to reveal you will get targeted
traffic and you can make money from your website. These free SEO
techniques really work.
Find the right keyword phrases
The first consideration in obtaining a high ranking
in the major search engines results pages are the keywords being
searched for. You want to optimize your site for keyword phrases that
are really being searched for by people. I say “phrases” because it is
very difficult to get high rankings for single-word keywords. There are
just too many websites competing for that high ranking. The more words
in the phrase the easier it will be to get that high ranking. Keyword
phrases with 3 or more words are known as “long-tailed” keywords. Long
tailed keywords are your friend.
For example, if you search Google for the keyword
“photographer” at the time of this writing, you would see that Google
returned 63,900,000 sites. That’s a lot of competition.
Let’s now search for “Stock Photographer”.
Google returns “22,700,000 competing sites. Better, but still not
exactly great. How about “concept stock photographers”?
Google comes back with a figure of 800,000 competitors. That’s
quite a difference. But wait…there’s more! I use
WordTracker
keyword tool to find out more
about the searches that real people are really searching for.
WordTracker tells me that for the keyword
“photographer”, if I was on the first results page on Google,
approximately 550 searchers would see my listing in a 24 hour period.
It also tells me that there are 102,000,000 competing sites. For the
keyword “photographers” (plural this time), I would have 63,900,000
competitors and would have 590 viewers. Pick plural if you have to
choose between the two.
I find out further that by using “stock
photographer” I could expect 0 visitors to find my site. Excuse me.
Zero? Yes… in the past 150 days no one used that search term! Don’t
use it for your title! However… the term “stock photo photographer”
would provide 156 viewers in a 24 hour period. Uh…was this useful
information? But wait…there’s more!
According to WordTracker you only have 7,820
competitors! Now we’re talking. Most of those 7,820 competitors are
like most of you readers…clueless about Search Engine Optimization. Now
that we are armed with a good keyword phrase that doesn’t have an
insurmountable amount of competition, and a phrase that people actually
search for, we can go about getting our site to the number 1 2 or 3
position on the results page.
Before moving on Id’ like to stress one more time
the importance of using a keyword tool such as WordTracker. Without it
I would have condemned the site to obscurity. With the tool I can focus
razor sharp on the keywords that really work. WordTracker is about $60
for a month of use. How many new customers would it take over the next
decade to pay for it?
The use of a keyword research tool is a key
technique for Photographers who want traffic to their site.
Build your site for human visitors
When optimizing your website think like a
human…that’s what Google is trying to do and doing a pretty good job of
it. There are of course some big limitations on what Google can find
out about your site, one being it cannot “see” pictures. Google sees
your site as you would if you had a text only browser. Switch your
browser to text only and look at your site. Impressive I bet.
Do your optimizing as though Mr. Searchengine was
standing behind you looking over your shoulder. No funny business. No
hidden text. No miss-direction.
Google reads text. It will check your meta
tags…the title tag, the description tag, and in a few cases the keyword
tag. It will read the alt tags for your images, and it will read the
text on your page. Another important source of information for the
engines is the anchor text in links to your site. The anchor text is
the part that is blue and underlined. The text around your link is
important as well, as is the subject matter of the page and the site
that the link is on.
Use the meta tags properly and to your advantage
The single most important element on your website
is your title tag. Period. When a major search engine spiders your
website the first thing it looks at the the title tag. It learns from
the title tag what that page is about. I see so many pages that have a
title on the home page “Home”. Lotta good that does you. If you want
to be found for a keyword phase it has to be in your title. If your
title reads something like: “John Smith – Photographer”, then Google
thinks it’s a page primarily about John Smith, not about a stock
photographer.
Another important element is your description tag.
Most of the time the sentence appearing directly below the title in the
search engine results page is the one contained in your meta description
tags. So be sure your keywords are included and that it is a sentence
that entices the searcher to visit your site. Don’t however be
deceptive. The first 10 words are the important ones.
Moving on, we come to the meta keywords tag. The
major search engines ignore this tag. Put about 10 keywords in if you
want, it might help some small niche search engine somewhere.
Google looks at the alt tags on your images and
looks at the file name of the image when trying to determine what an
image is about. Put a brief description of the picture in the alt tags,
using keywords and phrases when possible but don’t cram them in without
reason. Google is watching.
Use text on your page or forget being found.
Put some damned text on your pages! I know you
want to be “artsy” and not clutter up your beautiful images with text,
but if you want anyone to see the images you need to have some search
engine food on your site. Your text should have some keywords in it,
but it should be well written for human readers. You could describe the
details of the shoot, or explore potential uses for the stock photo etc.
Be creative.
A Word About Flash Sites...
Flash sites generally have little or no text, and thus have very poor
rankings in the search engines, unless they have a whole lot of links
pointing to their site. Recently Google has begun to index the
text on flash files so things should improve, but you still need the
text. Put text on your pages so the search engines have something
to use to index you.
Check your keyword phrases again
Use
WordTracker
or some other keyword tool
to make sure you have chosen the
correct phrases.
Another example:
The keyword phrase “dragon picture” has 101,000
competing sites and you could expect 45 potential visitors in 24 hours
if you were on the first page of results. If you choose the plural form
there are 358,000 competitors and you could expect 251 potential
visitors. By using the phrase “pictures of dragons” you would only have
73,000 competitors and 76 potential visitors in 24 hours.
Should you choose to use the phrase “pictures of
medieval dragons" you will have only 5 competitors and you will get 1
viewer in every 24 hour period. What are the chances of getting in the
top 10 positions on the first results page if you only have 5
competitors? If you do indeed have pictures of medieval dragons you
might end up selling one every day because of the sharp focus of the
long-tailed keyword phrases as they are called. Find the one guy that
really is looking for what you provide, and you will be better off than
getting 100 looky loos!
Get Links!
The major search engines look at how many links point to your site,
the anchor text of the link (the underlined blue text), the link text,
and the text around the link. Together with the subject matter of
the page and site, this determines how much value the link has. So
try to get links from related sites, on related pages, and with proper
link and anchor text.
Other than what is on your site, the incoming links are the second
major source for the engines to use in determining what your site is
about and it's value.
In fact, if you can get enough links pointing to
you with decent anchor text, you can get to #1 without doing any of the
optimization. That's how the really big outfits like Getty can get
away with no text on their pages. They have zillions of incoming links.
Regional factors
If your photography business involves a studio or a general location
such as wedding photographers etc. then put your location in your title
tag for your home page if you can. Work your location into the
text somewhere as well. It's always nice to show up #1 in your
city for your type of photography.
There are of course, many more factors that the
major search engines take into account than what I have covered here,
but implementing these simple steps will take you a long way toward that
stampede of free website traffic that you desire. Using these free
SEO techniques for photographers will bring you traffic!
|