SEO for Photographers

Part of the joy of wearing many hats is acquiring a broad range of knowledge in different areas. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Tweaking your photography website, especially your blog, to make each accessible to search engines and to help them rank really high, will help you get more readers and drive more potential clients to your site. I’ve written up a couple of tips for wedding photographers on how they can improve their blogs to meet both of these goals.

Title of your blog

I read hundreds (yes, hundreds) of photographers’ blogs each day. It’s really sad to see that so many of them are named something like “Journal”. The title of your blog may not seem to have a huge effect on those reading it, but it definitely has effects outside of looking at your physical blog. The title of your blog weighs heavily in how you rank for search engines. Do you want to rank among those searching for “Journal”? Or do you want to rank among those searching for “Seattle wedding photographer”? When somebody stumbles across your page in search results, the first thing that they’ll see is your title - make sure that it describes you and what you’re about. A great example is Washington D.C., Virginia, & Maryland Wedding Photographer - Armin DeFiesta. However, be aware that most search engines will not index past the first 70 characters.

Age of your blog

This one is simple - the longer your site’s been around, the higher it can be ranked. Also, the more time you have to build up links to your site, to build up content on your site, and to build readership. So if you haven’t started yours, start now!

URL of Your Blog and Updating Content

This is weighted less heavily in search engines, but it is something to consider. Check out these Philadelphia Wedding Photographers. If you were a bride searching on the web for wedding photographers in your area, how likely is it that you’d want to click on this link? Very.

Secondly, it is very helpful to your portfolio if you have your blog attached to it. In other words, having your blog’s URL as http://www.yoursite.com/blog will actually help www.yoursite.com, since you have new, updated content continually on that site. New content will be seen by search engines, which is great. This is a reason why it’s important to update your blog often! Not once a week, not once every two weeks - at least three times per week. I update mine every weekday - it retains readers and it gives search engines new content and keywords to index for my site.

Depth of URL

Although Google has said that it doesn’t matter how many slashes are in your URL (for example, yoursite.com/blog/2008/05/01/postname.htm), it is rumored that it negatively affects other search engine results. I also like to keep my URLs as clean as possible for easy linking, so mine look like

/blog/index.php/post-name.htm

If I could, I would also remove the index.php part, to keep it even simpler. I highly recommend inspecting your post URLs to see what they look like and to see if they can be cleaned up.

Linking to other sites

Although linking to other sites does not necessarily help you with your ranking in search engines, having others link to you helps you BIG TIME. So why not start a blogroll and link to other vendors, maybe even other photographer friends, and see if they return the favor? If you ask someone to link to you, also ask them to link the keywords you would like to rank high for. For example, I love it when someone links to me as a nontraditional wedding photographer. :) You can also ask them to include a “title=” element to the link tag with your name, the keywords, etc. which helps with your search ranking as well.

Within posts

“alt=” element in image tags: If your code for images looks like this:

<img src=”image.jpg” height=”900″ width=”600″>

then you are missing a golden opportunity for SEO. Adding alt=”keyword” in this tag will help immensely. For example, if I want to rank high for a search on a venue like the Watergate, and my image is of a bride dancing with her father at this location, my tag might read:

<img src=”bride.jpg” alt=”Wedding at the Watergate in DC” height=”900″ width=”600″ />

As photographers, this can be our biggest opportunity for search engine optimization. I also recommend bolding keywords like venue names, other vendors, etc. Search engines note this as well.

Headings: <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags will help you rank very high in search engine results for the words you put between them. For example, I have put <h3> tags around each of the subtitles in this post - “Title of your blog”, “Age of your blog”, etc. I highly recommend subtitling articles you write, or breaking up long posts this way.

Install Web Tracking Code

I use Google Analytics to track pages on my site. I can see how many visitors I had, how long they stayed on the site, what they saw, where they came from and what pages they exited on. I highly recommend installing tracking so you can follow the same things and then tweak your site to lower exit rates, increase pages per visit and time spent on your site, and the number of visitors you get from search engines. I know exactly what keywords are being used to get to my site, and I work on improving them and adding to them every day.

If you need help

If you need help doing any of these things or need more information on what I’ve described, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I am very interested in educating photographers on how they can improve their search rankings and drive more traffic to their site, since this can be a huge source of potential client inquiries. It’s worked for me, and I’d be happy to help you figure out how it can work for you!