His New Jersey graphic design company has evolved into an all in one professional shop with landscape and commercial/fashion portrait photography at its hub. His photography work can be seen in newspapers, magazines and ad agencies throughout the North East US.

The photographer SEO interview series gives insight to individual photographer experiences with implementing search engine optimization. I find it insightful and helpful to learn from their growth and mistakes.

Is your whole site built on a blog? How is that working for you?

Scott: My entire site and other sites I have created are built on WordPress not only because of its natural ability to attract search engines but also because of its ease of use to add and edit content. Once a design is completed for a WordPress website, the hard part is out of the way. The rest is simple clicks and WYSIWYG style composing if desired. There are a few websites I currently run that use the Posterous blogging platform. I did this because of how they are being used and that I am not concerned about backend functionality and SEO. A good example of this is my cell phone photo blog and also HDRPhotog.com.

Zach: My 3 sites are all completely WordPress as well. Quick, easy, affordable, and structured perfectly so that Google can read them. I think you will see more and more photographers make this jump to an all blog site as users find posts in search, read just one post, and make a purchasing decision without ever going to the photogs main site or Flash gallery (hidden to search).

WYSIWYG = what you see is what you get, where you can click an icon to bold something instead of coding it.

What are your favorite WordPress themes?

Scott: My favorite WordPress theme is WooThemes Canvas because of its flexibility and support from WooThemes. WooThemes keeps on top of customer complaints and suggestions. They are very quick to enhance a theme, fix a bug or help a customer out. Canvas also has built in SEO features like meta titles, descriptions and keywords. Scribe SEO is also supported for use with the built in SEO functions.

Before Canvas I was using the Thesis theme which is very similar. Thesis has its advantages over Canvas but my reason for switching goes beyond functionality.

I am also a big fan and affiliate of Theme Forest themes as well.

Zach: I run on Thesis for one site and Templatic for my blog seo site and am affiliates for both. I wrote a post about Recommended Photography Blog WordPress Themes.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

Scott: Before using a WordPress theme with built in SEO I was using All In One SEO. The plugin allows for SEO meta data to be automatically generated for each post or page.

Now with Canvas (and even Thesis) the SEO functions are built-in as is support for Scribe SEO. With Scribe SEO I have the ability to research better keywords for each post or page. Doing this without leaving my website saves a lot of time.

Zach: Yep. I love Scribe, who I am an affiliate for. I use it to measure the keyword usage of my posts. I don’t recommend auto generation of anything, but the All in One SEO Pack does give you control over your titles and descriptions which can be helpful in ranking, then getting your link clicked. I wrote a post on 8 SEO Plugins for WordPress Photoblogs.

I’ve seen your guest posts on Seshu’s photography interview site. Is that an SEO strategy?

Scott: I try to write guest posts on websites I enjoy and believe it. While writing a guest post, it is wise to include links back to your own website because “if you link it they will come”. People love to click. I can almost guarantee that the link I included above when I said “Thesis has its advantages over Canvas but my reason for switching goes beyond functionality.” will receive a bunch of hits form the guest post.

Has Flickr helped your SEO?

Scott: I had a bad experience with Flickr just over a year ago. After I had photos used without my permission I removed thousands of photos from my account. Since then I made sure that all of my Flickr uploads were no more than 1000px at its longest and always watermarked.

With that said, I don’t use Flickr as a marketing tool. I use it as a basic photo sharing site and a way to communicate and meet other photographers. Flickr is less than 5% of my incoming traffic because of this.

How are you doing SEO for your Flickr images?

Scott: On Flickr I include tags as I would in Lightroom. Tree, Green, Sky, etc.. For descriptions I include my copyright and links to my website and social media sites.

How has long-tail SEO helped you?

Scott: I do find myself ranking for random keywords that make no sense to what I’ve written about. A good example of this is “awesome backgrounds”. However if you search for “terminal locked comcast” I am number two because of when I wrote about my experience with Comcast.

Zach: That shows how photographers can take advantage of long phrases to get traffic. I like to see occasional posts that are not all about recent photo shoots. A post on How to Take a Great California Beach Photo might draw in some potential search traffic or get picked up by other sources that reference your article with a backlink.

What do you do to track your SEO?

I check Woopra & Google Analytics daily and Google Webmaster Tools monthly. Every once in a while I will do a random search as well just for fun.

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What does SEO mean to your business?

I was definitely doing only the minimum before to get my site in front of search engine visitors. Many of my best customers have found me by searching online so why not make more of an effort to get up in the search results? After carefully considering the keywords I want rank for, I realized that I wasn’t even showing up for one of the keyword sets. Within a few weeks of optimizing for that keyword set, I’m now ranked 13th and still moving up. For another keyword set, I moved up from 109 to 12th in less than a month. I’m now showing up in the top 15 for three of my primary keyword sets and expect to continue to see my results improve.

Did something happen that made you realize that your SEO efforts needed an overhaul?

Because the majority of my clients have come as referrals, I never really paid much attention to where I ranked with the search engines. But as I continue to grow my business I wanted to make sure I had exposure to more people and moving up in the rankings will help me attain my goals.

Zach: I think its typical for many photographers to focus on word of mouth. The best photographers use SEO to boost their traffic and client base so they can be selective about which shoots they want to do, or increase their prices to balance out the demand. So in my opinion, SEO can be great insurance for even the best referral-based businesses. Glad you got that.

What’s your best SEO tip?

Make sure your business location or market is all over your site. I can’t tell you how many photographer’s websites I visit that don’t indicate anywhere on the homepage or splash page what city they are in. If I can’t find it, neither can Google.

Zach: Nice! You are away ahead on this one. My ebook talks about this over and over and tells photographers how to rank based on location. Plus, ranking for a location that is not yours does not help grow your business. For example you can rank for “child photography” and get tons and tons of traffic but only a small percentage of those users will be in your area and give you a call.

The other point here is conversion once visitors are on your site. It should be clear to them that you’re in their city, and how they can contact you. Convert those users to leads!

How often do you look at your analytics, and what do you look for?

I look at my analytics data at least twice a week. I look to see if I’ve had a spike in traffic, and to see if I’m getting referrals from a new source. I also look at the keywords visitors are using to find my site, how long they stay on the site, and how many pages they are visiting on the site. This will help me tweak my site to better target potential customers.

Zach: Optimizing existing content is huge for SEO. I talk about how to do this in my video training about analytics. You nailed the two major reports: referring sites and keywords. Referring sites is great to find where others are talking about you.

How do you get links to your websites? You have a few websites… is that for SEO?

I have a number of different sites that link to each other. For example, my blog and main website link to each other whenever possible. I also have the online journal I keep that also links to both sites. I link to my sites from Twitter and Facebook and encourage clients to share the link to their sneak peek too. I’m listed with a number of different local business directories. I’m now writing for a local mom’s resource website too so that also links back to my sites. I have started to revise the way that I link between my sites to optimize for improving my rank.

Do you have a favorite SEO Tool?

Right now I am loving Traffic Travis. It lets me setup my domain and keyword phrases I want to rank on so I can run a report to see where I stand. It will also show me if I’ve moved up or down in the rankings since the last time I ran the report.

Zach: This is why I love the interview series. I had not heard of this tool, but just downloaded and was able to see some pretty cool info in a quick snapshot. I’m digging the SEO Analysis tab where you can analyze the top 10 or 20 results for a given term including number of backlinks, domain age, PageRank, and many more things that I’ve cropped from this view.

Travis Results for Houston Child Photographer

What’s your website setup?

Earlier this year I converted my site over from a hand-coded HTML website, to a BigFolio Flash site. I have the primary Flash site, the HTML mirror site, and an iPhone version. My photography blog is set up in Typepad using an advanced template that I tweaked myself.

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Michael and Rebecca Bielat’s Paramour Photography, LLC have captured chic, modern weddings and relaxed, lifestyle portraits since 2006. Michael also teaches photography via his inLIGHTin Workshop, with online learning and articles for photographers of all skill sets and disciplines. I asked him some questions about how his growth with search engine traffic and how SEO impacted his business.

What does SEO mean to your business?

Michael: SEO allows me to keep generating new clientele from month to month so it really is the life of my business. You have probably heard that word-of-mouth is the best way to advertise but how do you get clients to come to you in the first place? You can only do jobs for friends and family for so long hopping that they tell others. There are amazing statistics out there in regards to how the internet and web searches are becoming more of the norm so you have to utilize it to its fullest in order to succeed. Having the best SEO possible ensures that you show up when people are searching for your specialties.

Zach Prez: That makes me laugh. I saw a note from David Jay on Facebook about how SEO takes a photographer’s focus away from word of mouth. I don’t agree. Maybe for someone who is already VERY successful, it can be a distraction. My good friend was brand new to the area and started her business largely in part because of search. I think SEO is a great way to build that initial client base, then those satisfied customers can help you grow from word-of-mouth.

Did something happen that made you realize that your SEO efforts needed an overhaul?

Michael: When I started my business in 2006, it was called “Michael Alan Photography.” My wife was always helping out though and even was my associate shooter. I always thought that is was selfish to have the business under my name only so we made the decision to rename the business to “Paramour Photography” (Paramour translates to “With Love”) at the end of 2009. When we did this it was like we had to start all over to get new business. SEO was now more important than ever so I really read up as much as possible and implemented everything I could.

Zach Prez: I would add that you can never sell a business named after yourself and the keywords of that name won’t help you in search.

How do paid listings compare to non-paid SEO?

Michael: I would drop $25-50 here and there for Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising. I did only a couple paid link exchanges but those were never more than $6 a month. I just went with the top link exchange websites that showed up at the top of keywords that I wanted my business to be associated with. “Buffalo Wedding Photographers”, “weddings in buffalo” stuff like that.

The only real results I saw was they they were very good at deducting money from my account! Google Adwords was beneficial in showing me “hot” keywords that my ads were showing up under. I looked on the ones with the most impressions and the ones with the best click rate and really ran with those for my personal SEO endeavors. So I think using Google AdWords for a tiny bit may actually be helpful to get some information on juicy keywords.

Zach Prez: Interesting point… Google AdWords can be a useful keyword research tool. But traffic always stops when you stop paying them, so it always goes back to building organic (free) placement. Too bad you didn’t have my How to Build a Photographer Master Keyword List Video Training available at the time. It would have saved you some dough.

What percentage of your new clients come from search?

Michael: 50% or more come from the web. Being primarily wedding photographers, brides are always new to the scene. They get married and then they are out. So when new clients come to us, it is either because a friend referred us to them or they seen our work online. Portraits are the same way for us but we strive to create relationships with everyone and that helps generate repeat business with them.

What’s your best SEO tip?

Michael: Besides your ebook that caught TONS of little things I was missing in my SEO, get a blog and get one now! I learned over the years that Google is sort of like one big popularity contest. It likes seeing that reputable people are linking to your site, you are linking to other reputable sites and that you are updating your site! Having a blog is great because you can do a lot of SEO magic with it. There are great WordPress plug-ins to make things easier as well. Plus, you don’t have to be a web designer of Flash guru to make a real cool website. Flash sites look cool and they are well, flashy, but they are horrendous for SEO.

With blogs, search engines can see all your text and content which is awesome. Plus, making new blog entries is a breeze and it has a great user interface as well. With my flash site, I never update it so it is pointless. I would definitely recommend going with an external hosting provider to keep your WordPress blog rather than just using the simple one that you can make on WordPress.org’s site because you have a lot more customization that you can do with it.

Zach Prez: Excellent advice. I talk about that exact point in Photography Blog SEO Nirvana: Plugins & a Theme to Get You Ranked

Do you have a favorite SEO Tool?

Michael: A few, actually. Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and there are a ton of plug-ins for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that I love and use all the time. Firebug and Rank Checker are my favorites.

Zach Prez: Yeah, Rank checker is great for checking where you are ranked for a list of keywords that you have in mind. Google Webmaster Tools is excellent for seeing where you rank for everything (including things you may not know about). I have a products on that as well: Video Training: How to Track Keywords and SEO for Your Photography Site

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