If you want to be found on the Internet by people searching for photographers then good SEO is essential!
Google, (or any
search engine) is looking for the best site to send to a
searcher. So, of course, if you want to get on the first page
of the search engine results you site has to convince Google or whatever search
engine is being used that your site is the best or at least close to the best.
Google doesn't rely
on just your website, but also looks at the links on other websites that point
to your site. For instance, if someone searches for "photographer"
then Google goes and looks through its database and finds websites that are
related to "photographer". Let's say Google finds 10 sites
that are tied for 1st place. All ten are really good sites. To
break the tie, Google will look at how many links are pointed to the sites,
what the links say, and where the links come from and it will assign a score
for those links. The links from the most important websites will
count the most. Links from unrelated sites are worth almost nothing.
There isn't much
you can do about the links from other sites. Unless you are buddies with the
owner or something you most likely will not be able to have the links say what
you would like them to say. You would like them to contain the
keyword phrases you are trying to get a good ranking for.
The only place
where you have control is on your own site. Once
you have a "perfect" site, (search engine wise), then you need those
good links. If your website is really good, other sites with related
content will link to it. But again, all you can do is make the best site you
can and let the links happen!
So let's see what
you can do about your own site. Google
looks at 200 variables to makes its decision on where to rank your site. This
includes things like spelling and grammar; good sites don't have a lot of
miss-spelled words and/or poor grammar. It checks to see how many
pages the site has, how many of those pages are related to the keyword phrase
being searched for, what the keyword density is, what kinds of ads if any are
on the page, how cluttered the page is, etc. Nobody (outside of
Google) knows for sure what the 200 variables are and how they are rated.
You can have a
great website, but unless you tell Google about it you still won't rank well. For
good SEO, all you can do is make sure your site is really good, is easy to use
for humans, and can communicate that to Google.
If I was Google, I
would first look at the title of the website. If I were looking for
a photographer for a book cover, I would not bother with a website that had the
title: History of Mesopotamia. However, if I spotted a website
titled " John Lund, Professional Photographer, Sausalito, California, then
that might be worth taking a look at. The
search engines will look to see how often "photographer" is used on
each page, and if your site has the word on 3 pages but someone else has it
mentioned on 48 pages then they will probably get better results than
you. But that is just one variable of 200...
If a keyword phrase
is in the title, it should be in the text of the page at least once. Each page on your
site is a chance to optimize for a keyword phrase, maybe two, but not more than
that. It should be good reading for a human. So
you might have a page related to "business photos", and one titled
"Financial Concept Photos" and one "Photoshop Composite Photos"
etc. If you have lots of pages, each optimized for a phrase or two,
Google begins to think maybe you are an expert. That gives
you better ranking.
When you look at
the source code of your page you will see near the top of the page something
like this:
That is the title
tag and is in the "Head portion of the page". In other
words it has to be between the tags and also
in the head portion will be the description tag... put it under the title tag:
.
Pictures have an
alt tag you use to tell people who can't see the picture what it is
about. Google reads it. It's for blind people and people
that have text only browsers etc. Put a good detailed description of
the photo in the alt tags.
Typical alt tag (for
the picture at the top of this blog):
alt="A woman
executive stands at the top of a lighthouse in an urban setting scanning the
horizon for opportunities and risks in the world of business and finance."
HTML has something
called headings. H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6
H1 is the most
important heading. Use it only once on a page. Google thinks it’s
more important than regular text. H2
is next in importance... you can use it once or twice under an H1 tag. H3
and lower you can use lots of if you want to. But
they are for headings of paragraphs, nothing else. If you are going to work on
your site I would suggest you take a few online tutorials about HTML.
So, as far as SEO
goes...
Make as many pages
as you can about different aspects of your business.
Include as much
text as you can on each page... between 250 and 500 words is good.
Put the keyword
phrases in your title, alt tags, body text, use headings with the phrases in
your body text, and don't use the phrase too often. Usually 1 to 3
times in the body text is good. 10 times is too many for 250 to 500 words.
Google has to
spider your site before it can index and then rank it. So be sure
there are links on your pages that Google can read so it will know about all
your pages, or make a sitemap to tell Google what pages you have.
Join Google's
Webmaster Tools. It tells you everything you need to know about how
to rank well at Google.
Use Google
analytics.
And there you have it, my webmaster's sage advice on SEO for photographers…have fun!
