It’s time to step-up your SEO

SEO is not rocket science for people who create online content. It’s just a matter of knowing what to do, and more importantly, consistently doing it.

You know you have to create valuable, reader-focused content, and also:

1.      You’ve got to do keyword research.
2.      You’ve got to optimize your reader-focused content.
3.      You’ve got to build links to your site.

That’s basically it. Effectively and consistently do those three tasks, and you’ll achieve higher rankings and more targeted traffic.

Thousands of content creators do all three of these fundamental tasks right from WordPress. And scores of professional web writers use a web-based application to perform SEO for clients for use on any content platform.

How? With the Scribe SEO software. Check it out.

Users of Scribe SEO are raving about increased search traffic, higher rankings, increased efficiency, and easy content optimization. Now you can join them in stepping up your traffic and search rankings, and get a great deal at the same time. I’m one of those users.

Through November 5, 2010, get an amazing deal on Scribe.

For a limited time, you can “step up” your number of monthly Scribe content evaluations and keyword searches without paying the higher price for the next-level plan. That means you get a higher value Scribe plan for the price of the plan below it. This represents amazing savings off the regular Scribe pricing.

Before I send you over to the site to learn more about Scribe, you need to remember STEPUP.

That’s the code you’ll enter on the Plans and Pricing page to get the next higher plan for the lower price. Simply look for the yellow box below the plan option boxes, enter STEPUP in the promo code field, and push the “Get” button to see your new “step up” choices.

Remember, the code STEPUP is the key to the deal, so don’t forget to enter it. This offer ends at 5:00 PM Central time, November 5, 2010 (that’s this Friday!), so . . .

Even if you only try it for a month, it will reinforce SEO keyword basics every time you click the Analyze button on a blog post. It tells you stuff like:

• Title tag is too long
• Meta description is missing primary keywords
• Missing a link in the first paragraph of text
• Post too short
• Density of keywords (which are the most used)
• etc

Let me know what you think of it.

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I’m excited for the launch of Photographers Kick Start tomorrow because it includes the Photographers SEO Book as a free bonus and a listing in the I Want to Shoot My Kids directory. Both of these can obviously help your search engine optimization, which Jessica Grieves (creator) knows a thing or two about.

Use my affiliate link with discount coupon code photoseo20 to save $20 off your purchase price of the program.

That’s the best part. It includes:

• Editable Powerpoint presentation
• Keynote Presentation to use on a Mac or iPad
• PDF Speaker’s Notes.
• Student Handout.
• Layered PSD files for presentation images
• Marketing and Pricing Guide
• MOPS Guide
• A virtual swag bag with money saving coupons and freebies worth more than the price of the program.  Over a $300 value.

I personally know Jessica Grieves who has put together this program. Hence the cool bonus SEO stuff if you signup on May 20th. But she has a great background in training and has included some great value for the money.

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• Link Ideas for Photographers Building Search Rank

As the Creative Director of new online photo service PhotoMerchant, Kain wears many hats including interface designer, video producer, marketing director, strategist and customer support. He is also a passionate lomographer, occasional podcaster and self-confessed digital media nerd. He’s spearheading a lot of the SEO work going on over at PhotoMerchant (recently expanded into the US) so I asked him his take on some search engine optimization stuff.

What’s exciting you these days about SEO?

SEO is the cheapest and easiest way to get traffic coming to your website. Although some people treat SEO like a mystical science, in practice, it really comes down to using some common sense and a little bit of work. I’m excited by the idea that photographers can start to take control of their own marketing and brand image by following the simple rules laid out in the Photographers SEO Book. This is made even easier by using web-publishing system like WordPress or our own PhotoMerchant service.

Will SEO features become the competitive edge for a website company like yourself?

If photographers manage their photo assets well and create useful titles, descriptions and tags, then that information can form the basis for their images to add more depth to their search optimization. PhotoMerchant retains all the EXIF and IPTC information stored in the images and embeds that into the website with no additional work. I think that making the tools easy and intuitive to use, as well as integrating with analytics tools like Google Analytics, will allow Photographers to have a greater understanding of the impact SEO can have on their traffic, and more importantly, their bottom line. PhotoMerchant plans to take analytic data and make it a useful and intuitive tool for growing a photographers business – we have some incredible plans in this area.

Zach: That EXIF transfer can be a big time savings for Geotagging. And here’s more on my review of PhotoMerchant’s SEO features.

How important is SEO to your platform?

Search optimization is one of the key pillars for PhotoMerchant published websites. While we may not have completely nailed our implementation yet, we are continuing to find ways to make it easier to use and more deeply embedded into the site structure. Our primary goal for SEO is to make it an accessible tool that Photographers can use to grow their business.

What are you hearing from photographers about SEO?

I think the major issue with Photographers and their understanding of SEO is the language used to explain what it means. Only a small percentage of photographers understand the importance and relevance of SEO but almost all of them want to “appear in the Google”. I believe that as technical practitioners we can default to using industry terminology to explain our practices, but photographers do not live in this world. We need to create a terminology that makes SEO more accessible and understandable.

Do you have any advice for photographers just learning about SEO?

Yeah, buy the Photographers SEO book and then take the time to go through and implement all the recommendations. Then track and follow the success of your work, make adjustments and then track it some more. Like growing a plant, managing a photography business and website takes constant maintenance. Unfortunately a lot of photographers treat their website like a cactus – only watering it when it looks dead!

Zach: Wow, thanks. I didn’t even tell you to say that. Or they can sign up for PhotoMerchant then get the book for free.

SEO is new for a lot of folks. When did search become big?

Search has been big news since about 2001. The difference is that it’s becoming a more accessible tool in the marketer’s tool kit – especially as it’s relatively easy to do yourself at no cost. With rough 80% of people finding new websites through search, it’s soooo important for websites to implement even the most basic SEO practices.

There’s a lot of talk recently about whether SEO is still important in this day of social media. In my opinion, Social Media is fast becoming an important part of the Marketers toolkit but it will not replace Search any time soon. If you’re looking for a particular image or photography service, would you type it straight into a search engine or would you post your request to Facebook/twitter and wait for a response. Chances are you’ll do both. Search will give you the most immediate results and kick-start your research and by the time your social network responds, their suggestions are likely to augment and clarify the research you’ve already undertaken.

Zach: Nice response. I said similar in my post on Profiles and Social Search.

Are photographers more concerned with ranking their images or their businesses? Or do those go hand-in-hand?

I think this depends on the photographer. Hobbyist and emerging photographers are probably more interested in peer feedback and recognition whereas the more professional photographer will be more focused on maximizing their profitability or growing their business and specializations. I believe that photographers should be more focused on their business strategy and then find the appropriate tactics that support that strategy.

Do you have any thoughts about how social media and mobile usage might change the SEO landscape for photographers?

Social Media works best when you freely contribute your art and your self to the community. Too many photographers are missing out on opportunities to distribute their art and find new customers by ruining their work with intrusive watermarking and not providing useful meta data with their images.

By loading your images with relevant meta data, your contact information travels with your image allowing your photos to be more easily found and traced, but more importantly, allowing a prospective buyer to contact you and pay for additional services.

Photographers are paranoid about photos being downloaded from their website and somehow feel re-assured when customers are unable to right-click to save the photos. What they fail to realize that it’s just as easy to take a screenshot using basic screen capture tools that come with Windows and OSX. When an image is copied in this way, the meta data is no longer attached to the image and you’re no longer in control of where or how it is used.

In my opinion, I think that watermarking should be used to create a brand around your photography, it should promote the website where the image can be legitimately purchased and be integrated into the design to enhance it’s aesthetics, rather than destroy it’s practical application. The image should be packed with useful metadata that includes your website address, instructions on how the image can be distributed and attributed, keywords and EXIF information. Then, use Social Media to share your photographic gift with the world, allow it to be used in Creative Commons instances and set it free. The more you allow the photo to be distributed, the more likely you are going to create new business opportunities for yourself.

What we need is better image tracking and digital fingerprinting technology so that photographers can keep track of where their art is being used.

Obviously, stock photography has another set of rules to service based photography and intrusive watermarking is important.

That all said, the debate around copyright, watermarking and image theft will continue to rage with or without my contribution.

Mobile? Let’s leave that conversation for another day…

Zach: Good point about screenshots losing meta data. I agree that turning off right clicking is annoying and watermarks are much better practice.

What does the future hold for PhotoMerchant?

There’s a wealth of new features that we’re rolling out over the next few months that will provide our customers with the foundations they need to manage all parts of the photography business online. Our plan is to create an online application that anticipates the trends occurring inside a photographers business and then provides relevant business and marketing recommendations. Our goal is to make PhotoMerchant the dashboard to their business allowing the photographer to focus on managing their customer relationships, improving their workflow and refining their art.

Essentially, we want PhotoMerchant to become the photographers version of a HAL9000 – anticipating their every move and performing business and marketing tasks silently in the background. That is, before HAL went crazy and killed everyone on the space ship.

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• PhotoMerchant Search Engine Optimization Just Got Easy

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 not stopping there. From the top down, these guys are constantly looking to improve their platform to be better for photographers. Chris found me a few months ago and we’ve been talking SEO ever since. I finally thought to capture some of that discussion here so that you can get his thoughts on search engine optimization.

What excites you about search engine optimization?

It’s exciting when photographers end up on page 1 of Google search results for terms like “Pittsburgh wedding photography” and get discovered by brides as a result.

Will SEO features become the competitive edge for a website company like yourself?

It already is. Photographers in the know ask about it before they sign up for SmugMug.

How important is SEO to your platform?

For many of our customers, it’s critical. Their business depends on being found via search engines. We changed our entire URL structure to meet their needs.

What are you hearing from photographers about SEO?

Awareness among them is exploding about SEO, and they want to know how it’s done on SmugMug and what external references they can find to become expert.

Do you have any advice for photographers just learning about SEO?

We field many questions about it daily and the first place we send them is our Search Engine Help Page on the topic. The help page gives an overview and then recommends your ebook as well as your blog post about some of our SEO features.

SEO is new for a lot of folks. When did search become big?

It was big in the 90s but somehow companies like Yahoo and Excite began to think it had become a commodity. I remember Larry Page trying to sell his search engine (Google) to Exite for $1 million, but Excite passed because, “Nobody cares about search anymore.”

When Google showed how good it could get, it became big again.

Are photographers more concerned with ranking their images or their businesses? Or do those go hand-in-hand?

Most of the photographers I interact with who become interested in SEO want their businesses to be found. Wedding photographers are good examples. But some are really focused on seeing their photos or videos go viral. We hosted Vincent LaForet’s amazing 5D MKII video for example, that went viral and got a jillion views.

Do you have any thoughts about how social media and mobile usage might change the SEO landscape for photographers?

SEO is even more important if you want to be found on the devices people are increasingly using for search: iPhones, Droids, etc., because there isn’t much screen real estate on them for browsing, or paging through search results.

What does the future hold for SmugMug?

We’re surprised at how SmugMug is being used for increasingly mission-critical things: Barack Obama’s senatorial campaign, weddings from top pros, hosting photos for major events. You’ll see a string of new features from us like packages and continual innovation in SEO to serve pros.

What do you think about my ebook?

We recommend it to all new SmugMug subscribers who want to know more about SEO than they can learn from our help page.

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If your new to SEO, there are 2 aspects that affect ranking: on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are the ones you can control through your Showit template that I’ll highlight in the post below, like page titles, slideshow and image alt tags, and sitemaps. Off-page factors are outside of your website, most importantly the quality and quantity of links that point to you. If you could simply manipulate your title and meta tags (on-page factors) and rank well, then everybody would be ranked 1 in Google. That’s where my Photographers SEO Book will help your Showit SEO efforts. It teaches you how to craft the right text and get the best links to your website in the fastest and easiest to understand possible way. Pickup your copy now for just $39.

Showit Page Title Control

Your page title is arguably the most important element of the webpage that you can control for search purposes. Showit allows you to control a sitewide title which can appear either before or after your page level title. For example the title of my gallery page can appear as “My Site Name – My Page Name” or My Page Name – My Site Name” and you also have a couple choices for the dash in the middle. I would prefer to have the site name completely removed from the subpages, but appreciate the ability to write a page title that can be whatever I want. Many other website systems only offer access to one title that appears on all pages, or a title that can only be the same text as your gallery name (for example). Users can also default to sitewide settings if they do not want to create a unique title for each page. Below is an example of how easy it is to manipulate the title in the Showit system, and you can see the “Page” tab for updating page-specific titles.

Showit SEO Screen

Meta and Page Descriptions

As you saw in the screenshot above, Showit has a description field as well. On the SEO tab this acts as a meta description that will show with your search description as a reason for users to click your search result. Although meta descriptions no longer help you rank higher, they are important for converting users to click through your link and are therefore important.

At the page level you can use the description field to place html text into the page code that can be seen by search engines. This text supplements Flash on the page that Google cannot see, thus is very important for any Showit owner to take advantage of. Even a short description on each page is enough for Google to understand what your page is about. No need to load keywords here – a straightforward description of the page will suffice and if you can sprinkle in a phrase or two that users may search for then that is great. HTML is allowed, so if you are following along in my ebook then this is a good spot to add an H1 tags or links.

SiteMap

Showit automatically creates an XML sitemap of all your pages within your site and offers a button to submit it directly to Google in case you don’t want to wait for Google to find it.

Showit Sitemap Publish Screen

I think this is the reason Showit can market that its websites are 100% indexed by web crawlers. You can quickly confirm this statement to be true by typing site:domainname.com where you replace domainname.com with the name of a Showit website. Perhaps try this with one of the showcase sites from its websites to see what I mean. You’ll see a list of all the pages that Google has indexed for that site, and there will be plenty. The automatic sitemap feature can help when trying to get your subpages ranked, liked a specific gallery, and gives Showit an SEO edge over a couple of its competitors.

URL Control

I think Google’s second most important place for keywords is the URL and filenames of your pages. The site settings offer easy control over your domain name so that you can control your domain name, subdomains, etc. But the better feature comes in that each page has its own URL. That means you can link to an individual subpage (like a gallery) and that page can also rank in Google. More pages can loosely translate to more chances to rank in Google if you are targeting different keywords. Many other flash-based sites maintain one URL through the entire site, which never changes as the user navigates, which can be frustrating for users and search engines.

Showit URLs have a couple of minor drawbacks. They are far outweighed by the URL benefits, but I thought it necessary to point them out. First is that subpages are placed at the top folder level, so your URLs would look like showitsite.com/folder1 and showitsite.com/folder2 and you could not ever create a directory hierarchy like showitsite.com/folder1/folder2. The other is that sometimes a hash sign is placed in the URL and sometimes not, depending on where the user came from, for example showitsite.com/#/folder1. This can dilute your link equity if you have users linking to one form of the URL but you want them linking to another. Even though it is really the same page, Google sees each URL as unique and ranks them separately.

It is true that you generally don’t want to link to the URL with the # in it, so you can get your html link by right clicking on the page while inside Showit and get a more web friendly HTML URL.

Page Text

Users don’t see much text on the website pages, something many photographers probably enjoy because it keeps the design clean, professional, and focused on the imagery. For search purposes the text still appears within the HTML code and is visible by Google. This text can be controlled easily from page to page in the Showit system via the text layers feature. The layers allow code like H1 tags as well that search weigh more heavily for your most important keywords. So you can describe a photo gallery page with a couple paragraphs of SEO-rich text to help search understand what your gallery is about, and this text will not appear on the page.

Similarly there is a layer for image texts that will display in the code as alt attributes and can be very important to helping Google understand what your images are about. So even in a flash-based website, Showit provides a full HTML version of your website that is indexed and readable by search engines. Using the “SEO” button on the Showit stage you even have the opportunity to customize what components of your site you want to appear in the HTML view. For example you can do a Google search for Presentation0046 and see that the first result is a Showit site where the site owner used Presentation0046 as the alt tag for one of his images. I use that very specific (and irrelevant) keyword only to demonstrate that search engines use alt tags in its rankings, Showit makes this feature available, and you should therefore choose your image texts wisely!

The legal/copyright line also offers an opportunity for custom HTML text and links on the page – a great place for an extra keyword-rich phrase.

Miscellaneous Features

Alt tags – you can control the alt text of images by editing the layer text of the images that appear in the Flash. These alt tags appear in the HTML version of the site.

Snapshots – for users who have difficulty viewing Flash (like an iPhone) Showit provides the ability to take screen captures of your pages and present the page as a single image view.

Google Analytics integration – after you setup your free Google Analytics web stats account (not difficult, but there is a step-by-step guide in the Photographers SEO Book) then you easily enter your Analytics ID into your Site Settings area to start tracking information like which keywords sent you traffic from search or which other websites sent you the most visitors.

Zach recommends Showit Sites Free Version – Great for Checking out SEO Features

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Michael Heu is one of the founders of clickbooq and has over 15 years of experience in design, user interface, SEO and interactive media. Prior to joining clickbooq full-time, he was the founder and partner of Intersect NYC creating websites and interactive applications for Sony, Isaac Mizrahi, Lucky Magazine, Liz Claiborne, CarZen, and Gucci among others.

Thus you will be pleased to read this Q&A about the thoughts and future of SEO at clickbooq.

What excites you about search engine optimization?

I think SEO is really incredible in the sense that it allows a level playing field when it comes to the digital landscape. Your stay-at-home blogger can command a presence and a following that was never possible before the rise of search engines. Although this has also made the landscape somewhat more spammy in terms of people trying to game the system, for the mopst part it’s simply incredible that I can find useful information based on the results that search engines provide. SEO is very useful as you can start to tailor your web marketing initiatives in a way that is cost effective and also generates targeted traffic for your business.

Will SEO features become the competitive edge for a website company like yourself?

clickbooq has always kept it’s eye on advances in SEO practices. Most Flash based websites have a difficult time generating good SEO rankings due to the inability for bots to crawl flash .swf files. However, clickbooq automatically generates a “ghost” html site that mirrors the content found on your “real” site, allowing the best of both worlds; great images for your potential customers and searchable content for the bots to crawl. We feel that our methodology has lead us to have an advantage over other companies in this regard. As our system evolves we are always looking for other ways to enhance our site’s SEO friendliness and improve our results for our clients.

What are you hearing from photographers about SEO?

The honest truth is that most don’t know anything about SEO – just a panic or a fear that they are not taking enough action. But some are much more in tune with what good SEO is and are happy to hear about the support our platform offers in this area. One of the biggest moves that a photographer can make is to use our platform in conjunction with a WordPress blog and create posts and content that are keyword targeted. We’ve seen some great success with our clients that have had a dedicated approach to building their web site content with SEO in mind.

Zach recommends SEO for Photographer Sites: A Starting Point for the newbies in the house.

Do you have any advice for photographers just learning about SEO?

SEO is a tough nut to crack at the beginning if you don’t know anything about it. There’s a lot of terrible information out there and often people don’t really understand that SEO is part, a popularity contest. Optimizing your site is only 20% of the game while the other 80% is won by the back links that are pointing to your site (i.e. it’s popularity). The biggest thing that I learned when I was starting out was that I could have the greatest, prettiest website in the world, with ton’s of content. However, if no one ever linked to my site it was basically invisible for all intents and purposes.

Zach recommends Photographers Need Links to Rank in Search Engines.

So my advice is this: learn on-page techniques for SEO but don’t neglect off-page techniques such as getting links from other sites, blogs, directories, etc. Aother suggestion is to get focused when selecting your keywords. In other words don’t try to target “photographer” as your keyword unless you are willing to spend many years of your life getting hundreds or thousands of strong back links. Go “long-tail” for specific terms that have less competition overall. You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to examine search popularity for keywords to target and download the SEO For Firefox tool to examine the level of competition for a given keyword phrase.

Also, one link from a high PR website (that is “do-follow”) is way better than 100 links from low PR sites. Think of PR in terms of the Richter scale, the higher the PR the more important that link is, especially if it has your anchor text in the link.

What does the future hold for clickbooq?

We have a ton of new features in the works for this year and are continuing to evolve the platform so it adds even more value to our users.

Zach strongly recommends Clickbooq SEO Review: Websites for Professional Photographers

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• Clickbooq SEO Review: Websites for Professional Photographers

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. These features, combined with the Photographers SEO Book text and link building ideas will have you perfectly positioned for traffic growth.

Batch Keywords and Captions

In December SmugMug improved the usability of its image keywording feature. The benefits of this action allows photographers to clear previously entered “junk” data and then enter useful keywords for images. These keywords link together and bubble up into category pages, helping users and Google both filter and understand what the images are about. More on the intricacies of this upgrade from the SmugMug blog:

• A new option has been added to the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool.  It lets you remove all numeric keywords from a gallery.
• You’ll find a setting in your Control Panel to enable or disable automatic keyword generation from filenames (default: enabled).
• There is a Design Rule for Camera File Systems (DCF) that lets us ignore filenames generated by your camera.  We do not create keywords from filenames like IMG_001.JPG.
• Multi-word keywords no longer need to be quoted as long as they are followed by a comma or semi-colon.  For example, we used to require you to put quotes around “New York” to make one keyword phrase.  Now you can enter New York, or New York;
• 1 and 2-character keywords used to require quotes, but no more.  For example, 12, 5, would be added as keywords.

Homepage Meta Description Field

Since the meta description shows in search results, it may help readers click your link, thus is very important. You’ll find Andy all over Digital Grin answering questions, often SEO ones. In this post he quietly rolled out a great feature allowing users to control the homepage meta description from the control panel.

Up till now, Google would get META Description info from words in your bio box. This led to problems with folks having a slideshow and other code in their bio…

So, we made a control panel entry – Homepage Meta Description – 255 characters for you to describe your site, your business, whatever.

It’s what will show up here:

You’ll find this in your control panel, settings tab.

When you enter something in this new box, it’ll trump whatever’s in your bioBox (text, divs, code, anything). Enjoy!

Direct Links to Old and New Photo URLs

Previously was an update that allowed original photo URLs to work in addition to new “NiceName” URLs for photos which allow for better URL paths rich in keywords. What also impressed me about this series of notes is that SmugMug tells users how to select certain pages to be hidden from search. Hey – it shows how much control you have with your website when you can offer some pages to be indexed and some not – great feature for private images and proofing galleries! This upgrade can also be seen in the SmugMug blog:

NiceName Photo URLs

Direct links for photos that look like this will still work just fine: http://smugmug.com/photos/imageID_imageKey-Size.jpg

But now in the Get a Link feature, you’ll see that we serve up direct links that contain the photo’s filename as well as the NiceName for the category, subcategory, and gallery that photo lives in. Reason? Descriptive words directly associated with your photo = more relevant search engine results.

As always, SmugMug makes it easy to stay out of search engines if you’d prefer.

• Our Get a Link feature from the Share button will now properly update the embed code when the preview image is changed.
• Our Search Engine Optimization help page was overhauled by our in-house expert and has sage advice for those seeking love from Google.
• We fixed the “share photos” link in the single image view (found in older viewing styles)
• Files in your SmugVault that have a space in the filename can now be downloaded without a hitch.
• If you login while browsing a gallery, we’ll direct you right to the photo you were viewing.

NiceNames Results are In

In mid-2009 SmugMug released NiceNames, a feature that provided a quality keyword naming to the URL file structure and titles of  image galleries. The implications to search are huge in helping them to understand the content, and they were. Here are the stats, posted by the President of SmugMug on Digital Grin. This means the average photographer is getting more traffic under the new naming convention.

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• SmugMug SEO Guide and Features Review

By upgrading to a PRO subscription of Showit you will be able to:

Publish more than five pages to your website

• 10 Gigabytes of web hosting space
• Host your site at your own domain name
• Track your site stats with Google Analytics
• Remove Showit branding from your pages
• Access to PRO only content in Club Showit

So stay tuned while I am testing out my free version and looking at the titles, tagging, text and linking features that will be important if you are trying to rank your Showit site.

Zach strongly recommends Showit SEO: Search Review for Web Sites, Display & Slideshows

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• SmugMug SEO Guide and Features Review

One of the most important parts of SEO for photographers is getting stuff that Google can interpret onto your homepage. That means non-Flash, HTML-based text and images that you can control. PhotoMerchant has you covered…

Choose Your PhotoMerchant HTML Homepage

You choose any page you want to be your homepage! Very cool. It can be an HTML based page (great option) with lots of text and images, or a portfolio page (also a decent option if you name and describe your galleries well). In the portfolio page option you can show a list of your galleries  or a list of your gallery categories and either includes a thumbnail photo and description. Users can easily access your images and search sees lots of helpful code about your website not found in Flash sites. For example, the screenshot below shows a homepage with just one gallery featured, but you can see the gallery image and gallery description. The alt tag for the image uses the name of the gallery – helpful for search.

Example Homepage With One Gallery and Description

Titles and Meta Descriptions

As important as homepage text is your site and page titles. PhotoMerchant gives you access to edit the title, meta description, and keywords for your homepage, about page, and services page.

Gallery pages dynamically use titles and descriptions from other fields. For example the title of your galley page is forced to be Gallery Name: Site Name and the meta description is the description for your gallery (which may be hundreds of characters long). If you set your portfolio to be your homepage, then no meta description will appear for your homepage.

One note: meta descriptions do not help your rank position, they only entice users to click on your search result. So it’s better to use a compelling marketing statement here than keyword loading. Second, meta keywords are ignored! You won’t find any on my websites. If you must use them (and expose yourself to competitors) then use 5 or less words please.

Keywords and Categories

PhotoMerchant offers a field for image keywords. These keywords display on the page to help search engines (and users) understand what the image is about, but there is a much greater SEO benefit. Each keyword is hyperlinked to a page that aggregates all the images with that keyword for example /galleries/sydney-weddings/tag/bride. So you have potentially tens or hundreds of new keyword pages that add substance to your site and can potentially rank in Google.

Users View PhotoMerchant's Hyperlinked Image Keywords

Similarly, create categories for your galleries that can aggregate galleries of similar keyword types. The category name acts as the URL for your category, like /categories/weddings in the example below.

Gallery Categories in PhotoMerchant

URLs and Filenames

Subpages and galleries are all placed at the root level and the folder names determined based on the name of the page or the gallery. For example a gallery called Sydney Weddings would have a URL of /Sydney-Weddings, so your naming structure becomes very important.

Images lose their filenames during upload and will be converted to something meaningless to SEO. For example:
/memberdata/image_cache/300square_1781262710324849_1483414456.jpg

Obviously it would be better if you could use a folder and file path like /galleries/weddings/san-diego-bride-saying-vows.jpg because that gives Google some great information about your content and can help your rank. But that is not an option in the current version.

SEO Headers and Footers

Quickly rename the links in your top navigation. Not only are these links text-based (good for SEO) but the link name duplicates as the URL for the page (great for SEO).

Name Your Pages and Set Your Homepage

Your “Weddings” page will be /weddings and not /node123 or something meanigless like I have seen on some photography sites.

Top navigation buttons can link to new pages that you create. New Page button not shown in the above screenshot. This may be helpful if you want to build a special landing page for a search engine marketing pay per click campaign. If you don’t believe my advice above about sitemaps, then perhaps you can manually create a sitemap page. Or you can link away to your blog site, but still keep a link to it in your main navigation.

Your photography logo that appears at the top of the site can also help search. The filename of the logo will appear as the alt text for the logo (and is how Google reads it) or if you don’t have a logo the name of your site displays as text at the top of the page.

The footer is customizable including room for HTML tags, so you can add keywords and links. But no removing the “Powered by PhotoMerchant” link that will appear there.

You Can Embed HTML in Your PhotoMerchant Footer

Google Analytics

Easily integrate your web stats (Google Analytics) with PhotoMerchant by entering your Analytics ID into your administation page. With this free web tracking software you can see who is checking out your website including specifically what keywords are sending you traffic from Google! Google Analytics is the only tool I use and recommend for web stats.

Add a Google Anlytics ID to Track Web Stats

Integrated Sitemap Not Offered

Sitemaps do add a level of SEO-friendliness to a websites by allowing search engines to quickly index the contents of your site without looking at all the pages, like reading a table of contents. Although it does not come standard in this case, they are not entirely essential for PhotoMerchant sites at this point. I think the main benefit of site maps are so that Google can find and index all of your site’s content quickly and easily, which is already being done for PhotoMerchant sites based on its clean navigation system and keyword tagging of images (if you are using that feature). Basically the links that PhotoMerchant automatically creates allows Google to find your content without sitemaps.

How Much is a Higher Rank Worth to You?

Did you know that 25% of users click the first result and only 12% click the second result? The Photographers SEO Book can help you increase your rank with tips on text and linking specific to photographers. You’ve invested in your website, now invest in its results with easy to understand and implement tips for search engines.

Zach recommends PhotoMerchant US Launch will Compete with BluDomain, Clickbooq

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