Optimizing the businesses website for search engines can be a great way for photographers to attract a constant stream of potential clients to their websites. After working with SEO for many years I have learned to appreciate the value of SEO and it is without doubt the one strategy I advice everyone, regardless of industry, to look into.

SEO is a long term strategy as it does not happen over night. It can take everything from months to years to succeed with SEO. Firstly, let’s have a look at a definition about SEO provided by Wikipedia:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.”

For many SEO can be quite advance to wrap their heads around. This aim of this guide is to explain what SEO is and how to implement into your business strategy. I’ll explain the most used techniques according to the Pareto Principle which states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In other words, by implementing just 20% of the most important SEO techniques and strategies, you can harvest 80% of the effect.

The Content Table

How the Search Engines read your website
Keyword Research
Optimizing Your Photography Website For SEO
Work on your subpages
Make sure people link to your site
Don’t stop once you make the first spot

How the Search Engines read your website

To be able to understand the search engines, you must first walk in their shoes and see the web from their eyes.

Search engines have something called crawlers. These crawlers surf around the web with the goal of visiting everything they find, read it and index it into their databases. Depending on the popularity of a website and update frequency, these crawlers can come back several times a day to check for updates.

The search engines have come a long with their technology for the crawlers, however they still have a long way to go before we can call them intelligent. They still rely on algorithms and calculations to understand what your website is all about. If the crawlers sees words like “photography”, “studio” and “our clients” they are programmed to assume this is a photography business website.

The crawlers don’t see the images. They don’t watch videos. They can’t hear sounds. If you use these effects to build make up the whole of your website, you must make sure that if all visual and sound effect where removed, leaving nothing but the text left, would people still be able to understand what your website is all about? If not, this can become a problem.

The main objective for all search engines is to provide their users with the most relevant results possible when they search for whatever they are looking for. If you want to be coming up on the first page when people search for photographers in your area, it is important to make sure Google knows your relevant for it.

Keyword Research

Finding out what keywords you want your website to appear on is the first step. The two main keywords to rank for would be geographical and niche targeted keywords.

For example, if you are a wedding photographer based in San Francisco you would want to rank well for keywords such as:

“Wedding Photographer San Francisco”
“San Francisco Wedding Photographer”

I recommend using Google’s own Keyword Research Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to find out estimably how many many searches there is for the keywords you picked.

When you’ve made a long list of potential keywords it can be a good idea to narrow it down to something a bit easier to rank for by checking your competitors. The stronger the competition, the harder it will be to rank.

For example, the keyword “Photographer San Francisco” can be very hard to rank for as there are many photographers in San Francisco competing for this keyword. How about narrowing it down to a smaller area within San Francisco?

Ask yourself if you want to receive 50% (no, you are not likely to get 100% of the traffic even if you rank on top for a keyword) of the traffic on a keyword with 10.000 searchers a month (a keyword less people search for, with less competition) or 5% on a keyword with 50.000 searchers a month (a keyword more people search for, with more competition). Optimizing for the easier to rank for keywords with less competition, who are more relevant is what the SEO strategy referees to as “long tail”.

When you analyzed your keywords an narrowed them down to a short list of relevant keywords, with who doesn’t have to much competition, you are ready to implement them to your website.

Optimizing Your Photography Website For SEO

Back to what we discussed earlier, the crawlers only read the text they find in your source code and based on their calculations and algorithms, they try to make sense of what your page is all about.

Here is a Google tool to see what the crawlers see when they visit your page: http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/googlebot_simulator.php
As you can see, the pictures, movies, flash animations and sounds are all gone. It’s just plain old boring text. And that’s why it’s so important to make it easy for Google to read your site.

Follow this list to make your site more SEO friendly:

• Page title. The most important factor is what you put in your pages title. If you run a wedding photography business in San Francisco under the name “Viva Photography”, consider a title like “Wedding Photography San Francisco | Viva Photography”.
• Use title tags such as H1, H2 and H3. H1 should only be used once and should include the words your targeting.
• The more text content, the better. Google loves text, because it makes it easier for them to understand your site. You should however keep in mind that you should go on forever in your ramblings, because that might scare of your potential customers. If you can manage to stuff 200 words into the frontpage, that’s good.

Work on your subpages

Doing a good job on your subpages can give you a lot of extra traffic.

Using the same example you’ve been working on earlier, let’s say that you do model, landscape and bird photography as well as wedding photography.

Creating subpages for each of these categories, with titles such as “Model Photography San Francisco”, “Landscape Photography San Francisco” and “Bird Photography San Francisco” can bring you traffic on these search terms as well.

The subpages should include a bit of information about these services, maybe some samples on a call to action link telling the customer to get in touch for more information on how you can help them.

Make sure people link to your site

Depending on the competition on your keywords, sometimes all you have to do is a proper on-site search engine optimization of your site. In other cases, this is not enough. On-site optimizing can only get you that far. Even if you knew exactly how to optimize your site and you did a 100% job (which is impossible, seeing how Google wouldn’t let anyone know their algorithms to how they rank websites), you would only get that far if you have 10 competitors who have done the same.

That’s when the links joins the party.

Google evaluates your websites mainly based on 3 factors. How its technically built, what content you put on it and what everyone else on the web says about it. There is no limit to the last factor, getting people to link to and talk about  your website. That’s only limited by creativity.

The more relevant links you can get, the better. Remember to think quality before quantity. There is no point in having a web shop that sells shoes link to you, as Google will see straight through that. Here are some quick tips:

• Start a blog and link it to you website.
• Participate in photography communities and always link your profile to your blog.
• Find other photographers that aren’t competing in your niche. Ask them to link to you.
• Sign up for directories.
• Give away free photos in return for a link. Might seem like a bad investment today, but once you rank you’ll have a constant flow of free clients.
• Offer some guides or tutorials on your website.
• Write for Howitookit.com.

This list could go on forever. Like I said, it’s only limited by your creativity how you get people to link you.

Don’t stop once you make the first spot

To many go wrong on this one. If you do a good job working your site to the top of your preferred search terms in Google and once you reach the first spot you stop working for it, Google might think “Hey, why did people stop linking for this site all the suddenly? Was I tricked to people this site was popular?”. Don’t make Google feel cheated. Keep the links coming.

You don’t have to work as hard, just don’t go from 15 new links a month to 0.

If you are looking for more information there is plenty of guides on SEO out there. One of the industry leaders in SEO teaching is Seomoz (http://www.seomoz.org/). If you would like me to do some consulting for you, write an awesome tutorial or article for Howitookit.com and I’ll review your site and strategy in return.

Any tips or feedback is welcome in the comment field.

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