SEO for Photographers

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. Tweet

Any search engine optimization (SEO) expert or enthusiast will tell you  WordPress.org is the foundation for a photographer that wants to get optimal traffic from Google for a blog. You won’t reach nirvana by preaching the blogger.com, wordpress.com (they host it for you) or some home-baked blog religion. In my 6 years of SEO consulting, [...]

Blog titles and descriptions are a critical element in search engine ranking. Here’s a quick way to control these SEO elements for WordPress.org blogs.

The most important step in an SEO strategy is to create a keyword list so you focus your optimize efforts. This 60 minute recorded video training (iTunes/Quicktime compatible) will cover the process and tools I use to create a 100+ word keyword list: Keyword brainstorming Keyword demand – find high search words in your niche [...]

Tracking SEO with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Web stats save time and grow traffic. The photographers that I see who look at their analytics at least weekly are getting more than double the traffic than those who do not. I think it’s because they are serious about optimization, but also because of the GEMS [...]

Learn quick tips for crafting the alt text of your photos to bring in traffic from image searches.

In search engines the long tail applies to the large number of unique key phrases that send you traffic in little quantities. The beauty about these phrases Highly qualified Little competition (easier to rank) Can add up to the same volume as your main keyword phrase Cheap to purchase in Google adwords Long Tail Examples [...]

You should be getting at least 3 times the traffic (that’s 3x new client leads) from your blog as you do from your main website. How do I know this? Experience. This website used to be 5 pages and get a couple hundred visits per month. The second I started blogging I was showing up [...]

Grab my free SEO guide for SmugMug sites after reading this interview! SmugMug is the superhero of online photo sharing. And behind the mask is President and co-founder Chris MacAskill, whose small family business founded upon a love of photography has grown to 9 million monthly visitors and nearly a billion photos. But SmugMug is [...]

2 things: Google Profiles and Social Search. They go hand in hand. I suggest you set up something for yourself now and worry about how it will affect you later. I myself am still trying to figure out the benefits of all this as it relates to search engine optimization but I’m confident the ROI [...]

Overview of Showit’s SEO features for photography website templates including flash sites, tagging, and sitemaps. Photographers SEO book and blog offers link ideas and keyword advice for Showit websites.

I had a chance to sit down with Michael Heu and philosophize about SEO and clickbooq. And by sit down I mean, me at my computer and he at his computer, conversing over email. First let me say I am always impressed to get quality feedback from an executive about search engine optimization. When the [...]

Grab my free SEO guide for SmugMug sites to help you take advantage of the features discussed in this post! After browsing the SmugMug blog and its Digital Grin support forum and I see they’ve been busy rolling out SEO upgrades to its users. Below is a summary of what they have been up to. [...]

I’m in the habit of doing search engine optimization reviews of website systems that I think photographers would use. If I’m lucky, the company will offer a 7 day trial where I can check out some of the features related to SEO. Because you know they never list all the juicy ones, or the ones [...]

Geotagging, simply put, adds location information to your pictures or photos. My expertise begins when this location information can potentially impact your search results. Here is a quick overview of geotagging and impact on search. The short answer is that there is not a big benefit to search results. Latitude and longitude tags really only [...]

Create search optimized and beautiful photography portfolios with PhotoMerchant, plus all that other stuff you need to build your online business. And since I’m an inner beauty kind of guy, this post will outline for you the gorgeous SEO features of the PhotoMerchant system. They are hot. With easy access to all the main search [...]

Get the PhotoMerchant SEO How to Guide and the Photographers SEO Book for free ($39 value) when you sign up for a paid PhotoMerchant plan within the 14 day free trial (learn more). Already have your code from PhotoMerchant? Click the link below, then enter your code on the next screen. Soon you will be [...]

With pay-per-click (PPC) keywords or search engine marketing (SEM) photographers can instantly rank for any keyword. That’s right, you can rank in Google for any keyword you want in the photography industry in a matter of minutes. That is what I recommend every photographer have at least a minimal PPC campaign with Google Adwords. If [...]

Clickbooq offers beautiful web-based portfolio management perfect for photographers. Ease of use for editing simplifies the web for those non-technical photographers. Custom designs coupled with very clean navigation make the customer experience excellent, and their customer support was superb in answering my questions within an hour. Visually and technically, clickbooq has everything a photographer needs, [...]

Many photography searches come back with business results above the regular search results and a map next to them. These are very relevant and trust me they get clicked. These are local search listings and the cool thing is that you can get your photography business to show up there if you know a couple [...]

I saw a tweet from a photographer advertising “Free PR3 directory listing and back link.” This post plays on the fact that we all want links, and that we want quality ones, in this case a link from a directory that has a high PageRank. Of course this piqued my interest because I am always [...]

If you are new to web hosting, then you will need a web hosting account in order to use a self hosted blog service like WordPress. Self hosted blogs have a definite SEO advantage over hosted blogs. It is worth a few dollars in hosting fees for the flexibility you will get for full search [...]

Clikpic specializes in websites for photographers and artists and is based in the UK. Since I specialize in search engine optimisation for photographers and artists I want to review the SEO features of Clikpic photography websites so that you are best suited to get your Clikpic site into Google results. Some Clikpic features have built-in [...]

SEO tips for wedding photographers to rank in Google. Use wedding venue keywords in blog titles, URLs, images and create ‘Best Of’ posts. Optimize using Photographers SEO Book.

Search engines are machines that can’t interpret a visual image like a brain can. But they make inferences about images using a couple of factors: Alt (or alternate text) attributes of the image tag in the HTML code Text surrounding the image (text and comments on the page, image tags, etc) Filename of the image [...]

Top 5 search optimization features of SmugMug website templates for photographers and how they will help your photo site rank in search engines.

Linkbuilding ideas for photographers building SEO: community profiles, anchor text, deep pages, outbound links, and more from the Photographers SEO Book blog.

This SEO tips blog post is for photographers with a low or moderate understanding of search engine optimization (SEO). Find more beginner tips in the search book. The fastest and easiest starting point for new (or yet to be optimized) photography websites is to add keyword-rich meta data to your homepage. True meta data is [...]

Overview of BluDomain’s search engine optimization features in its photography website templates. Photographer’s SEO Book works great with BluDomain sites.

In my Photographer’s SEO Book, I give photographers step-by-step instructions for setting up a blog on WordPress. But as a photographer, first you need to understand why a blog can be so incredibly beneficial to your business. Specifically the search engine rank a blog can provide your business. After optimizing photographer websites for many years, [...]