Altheon
10th of June 2006 (Sat), 14:45
How many of you are making SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a part of your marketing strategy? Search engines are a great way to get traffic to your site and the best part is that it is free. So if SEO is a concern for you here are a few tips to help rank your pages a little better. Now this only applies to photographers with plain .html sites. Those of you with fancy flash sites will not benefit from this since search engine spiders choke on flash.
1) Target a specific key word phrase. If you are going for "Wedding Photographer" that is way too broad since we are all wedding photographers but the person looking for one in Iowa is not going to care about the photographers in Los Angeles. So make it very specific like: "Iowa Wedding Photographer".
2) Make sure your title tag contains the search engine term you are targeting.
3) Have the text in your "H1" tag the same as your title.
4) In the text of your page sprinkle your targeted phrase in there but don't do it excessively or else the SE will think your page is spamming. Take a look at the competitors that rank high for your target phrase and see how often they are using it.
5) For the images on your page make sure the file name is something useful like "Iowa-wedding.jpg" instead of something weird like: 001_img.jpg
6) Every image should have the "Alt" tag filled out with a short keyword filled description: "Iowa Wedding Photos". You can also put a "Title" tag in there but I haven't really noticed much of a benefit. Again it can't hurt unless you go way overboard. I've seen some people put a whole paragraph in there.
7) Name your pages with something appropriate i.e. wedding-photo-packages.html instead of page01.html (And when you are using multiple words choose the hyphen over the underscore to separate the words)
8 ) ** This one is very important ** get links to your website from other websites that are photo related using the keywords you are targeting as the anchor text. Ok let me translate that into non-geek. When you request a link from a site make sure the text they use to link to you contains the phrase you are targeting: For example: Phoenix Wedding Photographer (http://www.jimersonphotography.com/). Notice how the text is not the name of the company, its the phrase I'm going after. While having a link to your site from a florist or caterer isn't bad, links from other photographers are better.
As far as Meta tags for "Description" and "Keywords", you can fill them out but many search engines ignore them for ranking purposes. At least fill out the description since often this is the little blurb under your link in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).
These are just a few really basic tips to help make your .html based site better. I'll post more tips later. Another thing to bear in mind is that SEO is not a fast process changes, you make to your site today will take a while to show up in the rankings.
I don't know about you guys but since I'm in Arizona I don't really consider a photographer in another state my direct competition. So I was thinking that we could help each other out Search Engine wise if we started trading links to each other. If you would like to trade links with me just send me a message with your linking information i.e. Anchor Text (Phrase you are going after) and your URL or just post in this thread so others can start trading links with you.
Here is my linking code:
<a href="http://www.jimersonphotography.com/" title="Phoenix Arizona Wedding Photographer">Phoenix Wedding Photographer</a>
I did not come up with all this SEO stuff myself. These are lessons I have learned over the years as a web developer. Feel free to check out the Search Engine related forums for more info.
Cheers!
-A
P.S. My wedding site just went live a few weeks ago so the SE's don't love me... yet.
P.P.S. Be very wary of submitting your site to free for all link sites. Many of these sites are actually blacklisted by Search Engines and penalize the sites that they link to. Ouch!
1) Target a specific key word phrase. If you are going for "Wedding Photographer" that is way too broad since we are all wedding photographers but the person looking for one in Iowa is not going to care about the photographers in Los Angeles. So make it very specific like: "Iowa Wedding Photographer".
2) Make sure your title tag contains the search engine term you are targeting.
3) Have the text in your "H1" tag the same as your title.
4) In the text of your page sprinkle your targeted phrase in there but don't do it excessively or else the SE will think your page is spamming. Take a look at the competitors that rank high for your target phrase and see how often they are using it.
5) For the images on your page make sure the file name is something useful like "Iowa-wedding.jpg" instead of something weird like: 001_img.jpg
6) Every image should have the "Alt" tag filled out with a short keyword filled description: "Iowa Wedding Photos". You can also put a "Title" tag in there but I haven't really noticed much of a benefit. Again it can't hurt unless you go way overboard. I've seen some people put a whole paragraph in there.
7) Name your pages with something appropriate i.e. wedding-photo-packages.html instead of page01.html (And when you are using multiple words choose the hyphen over the underscore to separate the words)
8 ) ** This one is very important ** get links to your website from other websites that are photo related using the keywords you are targeting as the anchor text. Ok let me translate that into non-geek. When you request a link from a site make sure the text they use to link to you contains the phrase you are targeting: For example: Phoenix Wedding Photographer (http://www.jimersonphotography.com/). Notice how the text is not the name of the company, its the phrase I'm going after. While having a link to your site from a florist or caterer isn't bad, links from other photographers are better.
As far as Meta tags for "Description" and "Keywords", you can fill them out but many search engines ignore them for ranking purposes. At least fill out the description since often this is the little blurb under your link in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).
These are just a few really basic tips to help make your .html based site better. I'll post more tips later. Another thing to bear in mind is that SEO is not a fast process changes, you make to your site today will take a while to show up in the rankings.
I don't know about you guys but since I'm in Arizona I don't really consider a photographer in another state my direct competition. So I was thinking that we could help each other out Search Engine wise if we started trading links to each other. If you would like to trade links with me just send me a message with your linking information i.e. Anchor Text (Phrase you are going after) and your URL or just post in this thread so others can start trading links with you.
Here is my linking code:
<a href="http://www.jimersonphotography.com/" title="Phoenix Arizona Wedding Photographer">Phoenix Wedding Photographer</a>
I did not come up with all this SEO stuff myself. These are lessons I have learned over the years as a web developer. Feel free to check out the Search Engine related forums for more info.
Cheers!
-A
P.S. My wedding site just went live a few weeks ago so the SE's don't love me... yet.
P.P.S. Be very wary of submitting your site to free for all link sites. Many of these sites are actually blacklisted by Search Engines and penalize the sites that they link to. Ouch!