Four years ago I decided to take photography more seriously and took classes at San Francisco City College in photography basics, lighting, Photoshop, and the web.  I learned from Stephen Johnson Photography, Professional Photographers of America, Future Light Digital, and learn regularly from other photographers.  I started offering photography to my event video clients for dance, theatre, band, graduations, first communions, and more.  While I’ve dabbled in fine art photography doing landscapes I always have more fun when individuals, couples, and families are set in those landscapes.  And I love taking action shots at dance and theatre productions and make action-packed photo montages for DVD and the web.

    Most of my early video work was transferring tapes and film to DVD.  Today the focus is event video, event photography and tribute video (anniversaries, birthdays, memorials, etc.)   I love to get projects that include video and photography, and I love the creative freedom to tell a story from media my customers bring or media I create.  This job is fun.

I’ve been influenced in video by Ken Burns, Walter Murch,  and a variety of mountain biking video artists including Toby Citret and Clay Porter.  My photography influences are from Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Stephen Johnson, Rebekah Dotson, and Joyce Tennison.

Links:

Websites: Video & Photography , Home Movie and Video Transfers

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© Wesley Lewis Jr.

Our photography studio focuses on stunning imagery for clients of varied backgrounds and budgets. We also focus on providing personalized customer service for each client. After all, when done right, photography can, and should, be a very moving and emotional medium for our clients. Great photography is an art form and I truly enjoy its form of expression. We do focus on the details as well though, not just creativity and artistic appeal. From our equipment to our experience, we ensure we are able to capture images with stunning clarity.

My primary influence was my father. He too was an artist. He taught high school art for over 35 years, culminating in his school dedicating a Hall at the school to him after retirement. While younger, one of his passions was photography, which I picked up while young. I’ve had a camera in my hand since I was a teenager and have never lost my passion for photography.

I truly believe everyone should take the time to preserve what is special to them in a valuable photo. Loved ones, special events, and accomplishments, should be commemorated. Our studio aspires to become the one of choice for the Greater Kansas City, KS and Overland Park, KS area.

© Wesley Lewis Jr.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to working with you and your loved ones soon!

Website: Overland Park wedding photographer
FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/WJR-Studios/125420987493024
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/WJRstudios

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• Featured Member: Iacopo Di Luigi

Target a Different Long-Tail Keyword in Each Post

We see a lot of photographers who don’t seem to target any specific phrase with their blog posts. On the other side of the spectrum, we see many photographers who seem to reuse their main keyword phrase (ie, “Atlanta wedding photographer”) over and over in every blog post title.

Targeting the same phrase doesn’t help. You should have your homepage optimized for your main keyword phrase, and you should have priority landing pages for each priority phrase. If done right, these will always outrank an individual blog post for competitive terms.

Try, instead, to pick one keyword phrase for each blog post. Often, you’ll want to target “long-tail keywords.” These are phrases that are less competitive and don’t get much search volume, but are still directly related to the kind of photographic work you do.

Let’s say you are a wedding photographer in Denver. Your main phrases are things like Denver wedding photography, Denver engagement photography, and Denver portrait photography. But you periodically do engagements and other work in Rocky Mountain National Park and other nearby outdoor venues. When you post images from one of these shoots, consider targeting phrases like:

Engagement photography in Rocky Mountain National Park
Rocky Mountain engagement photography (or photos)
Bridal photos Rocky Mountain National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park wedding photography

You can do this for particular venues or locations, styles of photography, particular types of subject matter. There are lots of different keywords people search for, and in different order.

And if you’re not a wedding photographer, this principle still applies! Whatever photographic work you do, think about less common keyword phrases prospective clients are likely to type into search engines, and use a new blog post as a chance to compete for each phrase.

How to Quickly Optimize Each Post

Once you’ve picked a keyword phrase, you can optimize the post by:

• Using the keyword phrase in the blog post title
• Making sure the phrase appears in the URL for the post
• Using the phrase at least once in a subtitle
• Including at least 300 words of text
• Using the phrase, plus near variations, several times in the text
• For photo-heavy posts, consider adjusting image names or captions to contain variations of the phrase or related terms.

Link Between Related Blog Posts

Each time you post, take time to add links to any past posts on the same topic. Doing this is great for users, who can then go from post to post that they are interested in.

But it’s also great for search engines. As they begin to see a density of interlinked articles around specific topics, your site will have more credibility on that topic, and all those posts will rank better. Be sure to use relevant keywords to link to each past post as well, since link anchor text is an important ranking factor.

You’re Not Done Until You Promote the Post

Finally, you can really help long-tail blog posts dominate with a just a few external links. A great way to encourage these without having to do a lot of work is to promote the post. You don’t have to do a lot – just be sure the post goes out on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media venues you use. And for weddings, engagements, portraits, and other shoots, be sure to email the clients and let them know!

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If you follow this pattern regularly, you’ll quickly accumulate a big archive of blog posts that are all optimized for different but relevant keywords. Long-tail keywords, because they get less traffic, are usually easy to rank for. So these blog posts will each bring a small stream of targeted traffic to your site. And lots of posts, each sending small streams of traffic, ultimately add up to lots of targeted traffic.

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We all know you need links to rank on search engines and links are hard to get. Compared to other options, directory submissions are straightforward and the likelihood of success is high.

But you’ve also probably read that directory submissions have little effect, or that in some cases they can actually be harmful.

So, should you do it? Is it worth it?

It Depends on How Many Links You Already Have

If your website is well established, has a ton of high quality links, and ranks fairly well already, you can probably skip the directories.

Remember that the value of a link is roughly proportional to how hard it is to get. Because directory links are relatively easy, they’re less valued by Google and other search engines than, say, a link from within a blog post on a high-profile blog.

So if you have a great buckling profile already, adding a few directory links is not likely to help you much. The possible exceptions are Yahoo.com and Business.com (see below).

By contrast, if your site is has limited backlinks, then you should probably submit to at least a handful of directories. These will help give you an initial web footprint.

It Depends on Which Directories You’re Considering

There are a lot of directories out there, ranging from great and extremely valuable, to positively harmful. When evaluating directories, you should have two things in mind: high quality and relevant.

A high quality directory is one that has high standards. Submissions are reviewed by real editors, and websites are rejected if they are low quality or non-relevant.

A relevant directory is one that has lots of high quality sites that are relevant to yours. Photography directories are good. Directories where you are lumped in with bingo, casinos, and iphones are generally not.

Two of the highest quality general directories are dir.yahoo.com and business.com. Both of these are paid directories. But if you are willing to invest in your SEO, most professional SEO will advise that you submit to these.

Apart from the big two above, the best directories to consider are photography-specific directories. Here are some good possibilities:

• Photolinks: www.photolinks.com
• Photographers Index: photographersindex.com
• The Photographer Directory: the-photographer-directory.com
• Photography & Photographers: www.photographyphotographers.com
• Photography Pros: www.photographypros.com
• Photographers.com: www.photographers.com
• Photoclicks: www.photoclicks.net
• Cool Photoblogs: www.coolphotoblogs.com
• DPhotoJournal: www.dphotojournal.com/photography-directory/ 
• Photography Sites: www.photographysites.com
• Photography Corner: www.photographycorner.com/directory
• Best Wedding Sites: www.bestweddingsites.com
• Wedding Photography Directory: www.weddingphotographydirectory.com
• Wedding Photo USA: www.weddingphotousa.com

It Depends on Whether You Can Get Relevant Anchor Text

This is a consideration that doesn’t occur to most people. “Anchor text” is the actual text used in the link back to your site. Usually, most sites use your business name as your anchor text. If you are John Smith Photography, then most directories will link to you using John Smith Photography. 

The important point here is that link anchor text matters, not just the link itself. If other websites link to you as “John Smith Photography” then Google assumes you should rank well for that phrase. If other sites link to you as a “Chicago wedding photographer,” then Google will assume you can rank for that phrase. In short, Google weighs anchor text almost as much as the quantity or quality of links to your site. 

So even if you have a strong link profile, if there are ways you can get high quality directory links that use your all or part of your desired keywords in the link anchor text, then you should submit to those directories. 

There’s a catch, of course. Generally, high quality directories don’t allow you to do play with keywords like this. They’ll automatically link to you with your business name. You can sometimes find ways around this, but they require creativity and diligence: finding the right directories, planning your business name around your keywords, using partial keywords, etc. 

For more, also see our Photographer Guide to Link Directory Submissions.

Have you submitted to directories? Do you think it helped your rankings? Let us know!

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© Iacopo Di Luigi

Street Photography specifically is the best way for me to face every day life with an eye towards little details, moments, and those spit instants that contain magic. My camera allows me to share those frozen moments and that’s enough for me.

Everything clicked when I discovered a book by Henri-Cartier Bresson. I found it so inspirational that I couldn’t resist. Then I got to know photographers like Elliot Erwitt, Garry Winogrand, Richard Kalvar, Tony Ray-Jones and many more.

© Iacopo Di Luigi

During five years of shooting I’ve been working at small story telling projects of “behind the scenes” and events of any kind, using pictures instead of words. My aspiration is to able to tell visual stories about our society, our way of interacting with each other, our emotions and lifestyle.

Links:

Website: Reportage of the essence
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iacopodiluigi/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/IacopoDiLuigi

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© Mui Tsun

Childhood is a transient period. It is my aim to capture those fleeting moments and to produce distinctive and personal images of these quickly passing times.

As a photographer, I am inspired by the amazing diversity of natural beauty, textures, colours, the moods created by different lighting conditions and, most of all, human connections and individuality.

For me, whoever I’m photographing, the best picture is more than a good likeness, it’s the one that captures the uniqueness of the person you love and see.

To achieve that takes time and patience, especially with children. Relaxing and being natural can be difficult if you feel you’re part of a photographic queue, waiting in an unfamiliar portrait studio.

And that’s why I prefer to photograph my clients at their homes and gardens, or on locations, using primarily natural light. No white backdrop that every child stands in front of with a cheesy smile. No random props used in formulaic poses. Because every child is different.

My life has led me from my birth place Hong Kong to the tranquil Norfolk in the UK, and many places in between. And though the Norfolk countryside is very different from the bright lights of Hong Kong, it’s my home and a beautiful space I share with my partner and James, our son and my favourite model.

In my spare time, I love reading, listening to Radio 4, going to the cinema and theatre, and travelling. I am passionate about both science and art, and children-related topics.

© Mui Tsun

Our son, born in 2004, is my friend and my teacher. He makes me laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. He teaches me what is and isn’t important in life. And he teaches me to slow down and appreciate the beauty around us.

Links:

Website: Baby and child photographer Norwich
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/muitsunphotography
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Mui_Photography

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Google Instant Preview

Google announced it’s instant preview function on its blog:

With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we’ve made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call “Instant Previews” which makes it even faster to choose the right result.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here’s a video showing Instant Previews in action:

Instant preview allows users to look at a site before clicking on it. One more barrier to click through on search results if you’re site shows poorly. Type site:yoursite.com into Google to see what your results look like. It may not be pretty if you have a Flash site.

Google Social Search

In addition to natural Google search results, you might see custom results from your social circle. For example a Google images search result may also return images from the people you are connected to in Flickr, Picassa, Twitter, or Gmail.

The big news here is that other users may see your images or your content in their search results if they are connected to you. And they don’t have to be directly connected to you. They can be Kevin Bacon and still probably see your stuff. Cool thing is that as a user I am more likely to click on results from my social circle because these are people I know and trust.

Get into the social circle of your friends’ searches with a Google Profile. One reason to set this up now is so that someone else doesn’t snatch google.com/profiles/yourname!

Google Place Search

Place Search is a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places.Google has clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. If a person searches San Francisco photographer, with Place Search here’s what you’ll get:

The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and links from across the web, like user reviews and photos. Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.

More from the Google Blog.

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Someone searching “Los Angeles photographer” is more likely to click on a result when it says those words, the exact words they are searching. Here’s how you can align your page titles with user searches.

Unique Title for Each Page

If you have the same title for every page of your website (like in Flash sites), you’re telling Google and searchers that every page is about the same thing. That gives you one topic or phrase that can potentially rank, whereas a site with 100 different page titles can rank for 100 different phrases.

Every webpage on your site should try to rank for a different phrase, otherwise you’re competing with yourself in search results. There’s no point in making a blog post about Los Angeles photographer if the homepage is already trying to rank for the same thing.

Title Should be Written with Search in Mind

If you want a page to be found, it needs to use keywords that search engines and users can use to find it. Google doesn’t know a page titled “Zach’s Wedding 2010″ is really about a photo session at the Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles. Google won’t rank it, and users won’t click it when they see a page with a generic title.

Before writing each page, think about a specific phrase a user might type to find it. In the above example, a title like “Hyatt Hotel Wedding Photos from Zach’s Los Angeles Reception” can easily be found by brides getting married at the Hyatt. It will also have an easier time ranking for that phrase than fighting for position among competitive phrase like Los Angeles photographer.

Tips for Title Keywords

Follow these recommendations when writing page titles

• Write your homepage title first – it is the most likely page to rank well
• Describe the page – Google rewards honesty and users want to know what they are about to see
• Be specific – use adjectives and locations to help rank for niche phrases
• Keep it concise – anything more than about 60 characters gets cut off
• Don’t list a bunch of keywords in a row – nobody will click a link like that in search results
• Consider removing your company name – make more room for other keywords since you can rank on your own name without it being in the title
• Use more important keywords at the beginning

Check out a great tutorial on page titles from SEO Book.

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1. Flash site without a splash page or blog

An all Flash website, even one with an HTML shadow version, has an extremely uphill battle when trying to rank. An estimated 15% of your Google score is calculated by text on your page, which is invisible to Google (for the most part) when it resides within a Flash animation. If a search engine has trouble understanding the topic of your site (because of hidden Flash text), it has less confidence to rank you well.

Flash does come with advantages, like stellar photo presentation, music, and the ability to awe a potential client. The SEO workaround for these sites is to present an HTML homepage or splash page in front of the Flash, telling search engines everything you need to tell them. Similarly, a blog attached to a Flash site provides readable text.

Pickup the Splash Page SEO Guide for the skinny on exactly how to optimize a splash page.

2. URLs without keywords

URLs are among the most important on-site ranking factors. Search engines see keywords in URLs as a strong signal for what your page is about. If a page on your site has a URL looks like this: www.yoursite.com/?page-id=5, search engines can tell what the subject matter is. Change the URL to www.yoursite.com/san-francisco-childrens-portraits, and suddenly it’s very clear, even without looking at the page. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLS.

3. Same title for all pages

A searcher types a phrase into Google, then Google goes and looks for pages about that phrase. It looks first at webpage titles, because a title most accurately describes what a page is about. If your Flash site or blog uses the same title for every page, a search engine thinks your site is about one thing. In reality, you want to rank for many different things (like wedding, bride, engagement, receptions) and therefore need a different page title for each of those topics.

Check your page titles by typing site:yourdomainname.com into Google. This shows all the pages on your site found by Google, and each underlined link is a page title. Make sure each title is unique and captures a different segment that would be valuable to people searching for your business.

4. The same major phrase in all your titles or image alt text

Many photographers get the fact that they need keywords in the title to rank well. Often overlooked is that search engines can only rank 1 page from your site for any given keyword phrase. If you’re trying to rank for California Photographer, only one of your pages can be successful. For major competitive phrases that page is almost always your homepage. It makes no sense to put “- California Photographer” at the end of every page title. Your intention should be to rank your homepage for that phrase, and save every other page for a different unique phrase. You’ll get a lot more traffic when your subpages stop competing with your homepage, and start ranking for related phrases that are less competitive.

The same is true of alternate text for images. When your image text describes the image, you’ll use tons of related keywords that help you rank for very niche searches. Don’t bother adding “-California Photographer” at the end of every image when the page is about “Ritz Carlton Wedding”. Try to rank for Ritz Carlton searches instead.

5. Inadequate text

SEO mistake #1 talked about how search engines need text on a page to understand the topic. Even without Flash, many photographer do a poor job of giving Google text that the page needs to rank well. The minimum standard is about 300 words to give search engines confidence that the page has substance and meaning to potential searchers. 300 words for every page and blog post becomes easy when you add testimonials, contact information, related links to top pages/galleries, and add captions for each photo…

6. Missing captions

Right after users read the headline, they look at the first image on the page, then read its caption. It’s human nature. Captions are read more than the page text! Search engines use captions to understand the context of an image because a compute can’t visually see an image like humans. Captions are a great way to integrate keywords into the page, while adding to the overall word count. Use very specific words to help the page and image rank for non-competitive keywords. An example caption: 4-year old girl in a red GAP dress and beanie dances for an urban photo. You can picture the image and imagine the story on the page simply from the caption – so can Google.

7. Wasting time on meta keywords

Meta keywords are that list of keywords you type into a field of your website system, telling the world what you want to rank for. If ranking were that easy, everyone would be ranked #1. Google stopped using this field years and years ago, so laying out your keywords in meta data just wastes time and reveals your desires to anyone who looks at your source code. If you’re not comfortable leaving the field completely blank, put one phrase there. More than a couple phrases gets spammy.

8. Blog tags and categories

Blog tags do the same thing as meta keywords… nothing for SEO. If you think you’re proving value for users that want to click on your blog post tag, check your analytics to see how many people are clicking them. This is done easily in Google Analytics by clicking Content > Top Content and searching for /tag. Trust me – nobody clicks your tags and they provide duplicate content Google doesn’t care for much.

Categories only have value if they appear in the URLs of the blog post. This post for example has a parent category of /seo and a child category of /keywords-meta-tags that add keyword power to the URL. You need an advanced permalink structure to take advantage of this and most photographers don’t need it. If you’ve named your categories something like California Photographer, California Portrait Photographer, and California Wedding Photographer then you’re not helping your SEO. If you use categories, they should be named something appropriate for your website users to help them filter posts, like Weddings, and Portraits.

9. Load time

Google spends even less time on your site than your users. Don’t let everyone pass up your site because it takes forever to load. Google officially announced that page speed is a factor in ranking well. Flash sites and blog homepages (with 10 posts and 10 huge images in each post) are notorious for slow-loads. You can lose a lot of traffic from impatient searchers and search engines.

10. Image filenames

We talked earlier about how search engines can’t see an image like humans. Search “reads” an image through it’s alternate text, caption, and image filename (the name of the image on your computer). Tell Google more about your image by naming it 3-year-old-red-dress.jpg instead of DS001.jpg. Hyphens help distinguish the individual keywords and are the preferred naming convention for SEO. Imagine how much keyword information you can give Google when you’re posting hundreds or thousands of images to your website!

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It only takes a couple minutes to assess some of the top factors that search engines look at in order to rank a website well. Here’s 10 basic items easy to assess for any website.

1. Page Titles

Do the page titles focus on one key phrase per page, starting with a broad phrase for the homepage and niche phrases for the subpages and blog posts? Since only one page from your site will rank for any given phrase, I make sure you’re not using the same phrase in multiple titles (like – New York wedding photographer in every blog post).

2. Page Meta Descriptions

Page descriptions appear in search results and make the user want to click your link among the tons of search results. Does the meta description use the business name, have a call to action (like “View great photos now”) and give info about the niche and locations served?

3. Backlinks

How difficult will it be to rank given the competition for the major key phrase? I use a backlink checker or Traffic Travis to see how many links the website has and compare that to the number of links by the top couple of ranked sites. If you’re site has 10 links and the #3 site has 100 links, either you have a lot of link building to do or you need to focus on a smaller and less competitive key phrase.

4. Alternate text

Are the images using alternate text to help Google understand what they are about? I check to see if the alternate texts are a single sentence that describes the image, but also use quality keywords and adjectives where possible. On subpages and blog posts, focus on niche keywords rather than broad ones that would only help your rank.

5. Conversion Tactics

If a user finds a page in a search engine, you have one chance form that page to get him to contact/hire you. You can’t rely on the user to click through to your homepage, gallery, or other page. That means every page that could potentially rank in search needs to sell the user on your services and get them to convert (contact you). I suggest including contact information, a short bio, testimonial, and related information (“You may also like…”) in your most popular search pages.

6. Homepage Text

The homepage or splash page needs 300+ words so that Google knows it is legitimate. Think about it, if you are a searcher would you prfer to visit a page with only images, or a page with images and text that explain what you’re looking for? In addition to keyword-rich text it is important to link to your most important search pages (i.e. your top 5 blog posts) to pass as much SEO credit as possible to them from your homepage.

7. URLs

Does the site take advantage of the #2 most important place for keywords? URLs of the pages, blog posts, and even image filenames need quality keywords while excluding “stop” words that Google ignores like “and” or “the”.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but takes a look at some factors you can assess on your website, blog, and images to identify room for SEO growth.

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