Linus Moran Photography has been at the forefront of documentary story telling sharing a passion for the genre thereby making it second nature to them.

Their first documentary wedding was whilst working as photojournalists in the Balkans. It was a study on the Pomak people inhabiting some villages throughout the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria. The custom and traditions were fascinating, but essentially it was the same rite of passage that many couples experience, a common story but so many ways it could be told. The wedding made a lasting impression and upon returning to the UK, proved to be the new direction with which to build their business.

They are documentary wedding photographers working throughout the UK and select foreign destinations offering high-end service to discerning Brides and Grooms.

Innovative in their approach they see the future of wedding photography within living digital albums called ‘Photofilms’. They have taken the initiative to be one of the first UK photographers (to our knowledge) to offer these as the main album of choice.

Wedding Photofilms are the marriage of fine stills photography with the audio soundtrack of the wedding day. Recording your vows, after dinner speeches and other sound bites, they then edit these to create an emotive film presentation.

Adopting the photofilm format came after exploring several other formats including video fusion. But an underlying aversion to video and their love of stills photography won through.

Being keen enthusiasts of other documentary wedding photographers work, they came across the photofilm work of Neale James. Neale had a radio production background prior to picking up the camera and had started to fuse his stills work with the audio soundtrack he was so clearly adept at creating.

On viewing their first photofilm they were gripped with the format, the emotive power it carried was amazing. It convinced them that it was something that needed to be explored more, and that it could be an integral part of their business.

They sought Neale’s advice to which he was extremely helpful and supportive, advising on equipment and software to use.

A benefit of the recording equipment used is that it remains very lightweight and unobtrusive for the subjects. Something of great importance when wanting to retain the low key approach to wedding photography.

Photofilms are designed for viewing on the everyday gadgets we are all surrounded by – tablets, iPhones and computers. Photofilms can be taken anywhere and shared instantly. Having advantages such as giving the chance of family members unable to attend an opportunity to experience the real sentiment and occasion of your day. Similarly, being small enough to easily upload to multiple social media sites and instantly shared with friends and family.

Audio is often overlooked, when it is something undeniably rich in story telling abilities. Tone, pitch, accent, dialect are all details that have their role to play in telling stories, and what finer story to tell, than the one of YOUR family and your wedding day?

Linus Moran Photography are a husband and wife team based in Dorset, United Kingdom. They work throughout the UK offering their distinct style of wedding photography and wedding photofilm videos.

Links:
Dorset Wedding Photographer
Twitter: https://twitter.com/linusmoran
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Linus.Moran.Photography
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/linusmoran?feature=mhee

Turns out that is not the case for everyone.

HubSpot, an inbound marketing company, creased a tool called RetweetLab that analyzes the history of your Twitter account to determine some optimal metrics to consider when tweeting.

• Day of the week to tweet
• Hour to tweet
• Tweet length
• Reading grade level (just make it readable!)
• Sentiment (be nice!)
• Capitalization percentage (make it readable!)
• Most retweeted words
• Hashtags included or not
• Quotations included or not
• Links included or not
• Calls to action
• Questions

Check out this quick video walk-through

Now head over to Retweet Lab to try it on for size.

Thanks for reading,

Scott

The answer is is two-fold.  The easiest answer is yes, you can modify the article for SEO changes and it can be beneficial.  For example, I wrote an article talking about WordPress plugins for photographers and in it, I did a little optimization.  A few months after publishing the article, I went back and spent an hour using the WordPress SEO by Yoast Page Analysis to determine ways that I can improve the optimization.

Using the tool, I made adjustments to the content and meta description.  The changes I made improved the articles rankings for the focus keyword.

Around the same time, Google created its Authorship and the WordPress SEO plugin was updated to include it.  So of course, I took the appropriate steps to add Google authorship to my articles.

Now, although it is very possible to improve content for search engine rankings, it is also possible to hurt the article.  Hopefully each article or page that you create is optimized for one keyword.  However, some choose to try and squeeze multiple keywords into content.  If so, tweaking can hurt one or both keywords.

Another example would be over optimizing for a keyword.  It is always important to remember the fine line between SEO and user experience (UX).   If the text content that you write is over optimized it will not be readable by your website visitors, which will be a turn off and decrease possible conversions and/or increase bounce rate.

Moral of the story… think before you tweak.  Consider what you are trying to do and create a short list of changes that you are thinking of making.  Review those changes for potential conflicts or issues that may arise.  Then implement what is worth it.

Thanks for reading and thank you Sarah for the awesome question.

Scott

Portent is a marketing agency who often shares great content for marketing and SEO. They recently published a new tool that can be very useful for generating blog article ideas.

In the video below, I will show you how to use the tool and what to expect. Please note that the tool can be fun, and useful, but is not perfect. So expect for strange titles to appear.

Portent also notes that the user must fix grammar errors that show up in the results.

To try Portent’s Content Idea Generator, go to http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/

More more on blog topics, visit the Blog Topic Hub open to members only.

Thanks for reading and viewing,
Scott

It is of great importance, then, that you put effort into making sure that you have a bit more control over your traffic channels. If your masterpieces can’t be found, then they can’t be shared. Presumably, you’ve only created your content because you know there’s demand for it, so the obvious place to position it would be at the top of the search engines.

Of course, there’s more to SEO than researching keywords and then making sure they’re in the right tags. I’m going to focus on some hints about page load speed that can be applied to your website as a whole to make the most of good keyword placement. Hopefully, they’ll also be things that are a bit newer for you too.

It is a given that websites only have a very short amount of time within which to make the right impression. In its mission to provide users with only the best websites, Google takes into account the amount of time it takes to load a page. The theory here is that a fast loading website is a usable website, and I must say that this seems to be common sense. Luckily there are a number of ways to speed things up, and you are largely in control of them.

Have your development team work on minifying JavaScript and CSS files. This will help enormously, as it means that your code and scripts are smaller, and more efficient. The fact that a page might load with multiple scripts and stylesheets will mean that there’s quite a substantial cumulative time saving available. An additional tip is to load your JavaScript files in the footer, rather than in the header. This means that the scripts are loaded after the page content has loaded, resulting in a quicker user experience.

Your images and content should also be compressed. This is of even greater importance if you have a lot of galleries on your site. For images, the obvious place to go for compression is Yahoo!’s Smush It service, however, you will need to re-upload your images after they have been smushed. If you prefer, you can compress images in editing software before uploading. For text content compression, you will need to apply the gzip program.

You will also want to consider employing the use of a content delivery network (CDN). If you’re looking for a free option, Clouflare would be a good choice, but paid options are also available, with MaxCDN, EdgeCast and Akamai being quite popular ones. This form of cloud computing will greatly speed up any website, allowing your files and content to be downloaded from virtual servers based pretty much anywhere in the world. Cloud computing may seem like a buzzword, but it is very much something you need to consider for growth.

Cloud web hosting is capable of supporting this growth because it is scalable. If you need more resource to support your website, the cloud can handle it without a hitch. Visitors to your website won’t experience any form of lag or delay either; their visit to the site will be as normal. The magic happens in the background, whereby if more resource is required, additional virtual servers are brought in to make up the deficit, and then dispersed once the need is over. For you, the best part is that you generally only pay for what you use.

There are plenty of companies that can host your website on the cloud. There’s a lot of information out there, with so many companies claiming to do the same thing to varying degrees of competence. If you are stuck, then consider Rackspace’s cloud hosting option. By doing so, you’ll get the complete package, where you get full blown scalability, excellent support and almost permanent uptime. Incidentally, Rackspace can also provide CDN and photo storage options, through their Cloud Files service, so this would check a couple of boxes in one go.

So hopefully that gives you a better insight into more ways within which to improve your search engine performance. Moving beyond keywords is an important step, so do remember that you need to take more of the technical side of things into account.

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This article was written by Mun Yin, a tech addict and an experienced online marketing professional.

Scott’s Note: If your website is driven by WordPress, my preferred hosting solution is WP Engine or Synthesis who also offer the speed and security of Rackspace, but with with a different price.

Image from Design Tutorial

1 – spellcheckplus.com

The list may be in no particular order, but even if it were, this tool would still have come in at number one. It is a tool you can use in conjunction with your current spelling and grammar checker. If we assume that you use a spelling and grammar checker such as the one that comes with Microsoft Word, then it is going to highlight a few issues that your work may have. The spellcheckplus.com tool will then examine your work and pick up on the things you may have missed.

It is an online tool that is on the website spellcheckplus.com, and was created by a few dedicated individuals who are trying to help people improve their writing. Just like all spelling and grammar checkers, it is not perfect, but it works as a great ally to your current grammar and spelling checker. It is also free, and if you want to make a small donation then they will allow you to have full access to their tool for a full year.

2 – Rapportive

This is a tool that will allow you to create detailed contact profiles within your Gmail account. This is very handy if you are a frequent guest blogger. You can add information to your contact list so that you can find the right blog owner with ease, and so that you can keep track of your progress with the blog owner. You can make small notes about the people that you contact, so for example, you can note how many posts that the blog owner has accepted, or you can note down the sorts of things that the blog owner accepts. It is a good and unique tool that you should try if you have a Gmail account.

3 – Scrapebox

This is a guest blogging tool that gives you lots of different options to help you find a potential guest blog. It has the ability to find you thousands of guest blogs that you can apply to, to see if they will accept your guest blog. The user can enter several pieces of information that is then used to hunt down the bloggers who are making the most noise. It gives you a larger number of blogs to apply to.

4 – Boomerang

This is a blogging assistant that you can use in conjunction with your Gmail account. You can also use it for time management too. You schedule emails that you can program to be sent later in the day. You can take control of your daily activities, and you can set reminders too. You can arrange your day so that you contact people with relevant information at the promised time. You can use this tool to make sure that you do not forget one of your blog master clients, and also so that you can work in different time zones without any fuss or fear.

5 – Followerwonk

This is a good tool for finding popular people on social media. All you need to do is find them and you can see if they have a blog that you can add to. You can see if they will write a blog post for you that you can submit to another person’s blog. You can also look up popular people and see if they can help you to get your blog posts accepted by a certain blog. There are also a number of popularity and marketing issues you could discuss with the people who you find.

6 – Guest Post Query Generator

When you are looking for blogs to post in, you may become sick of searching Google, only to find the same old thing. You can use the Guest Post Query Generator to come up with different search terms. You then enter them into the Google search engine and use the results as you wish.

7 – Streak

This is a tool that you can add to your Gmail account. It gives you even more email options than you have with just Gmail alone. It is good for guest blogging because it has little tools you can use to help you, such as its Journalism template. This will allow you to add certain people to certain projects and assign certain topics to other people or projects. If you are working with several blogs, or several blog writers, then this tool will help you to organize your efforts.

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Article by Robert from WorldSystems, a software development company

Often times I noticed photographers linking internally in unusual ways.  So in the video below, you will see the smart way to implement internal linking on your photography website.

How about a live example?

The wrong way: Visit the video SEO article to learn more about how to implement video previews in your search engine results. Click here to check it out.

The right way: Visit the video SEO article to learn more about how to implement video previews in your search engine results.

Thanks for reading,

Scott

Use your phrase to build links and relationships.

More on that…

How about an example:

If I had a 1GB for every phrase I coined, I’d have a heck of a lot of storage space. (tweet this)

If you need help creating the HTML code for your articles, try Click To Tweet and they will give you a link URL to use. It works great!

Thanks for reading,
Scott

They have announced Scribe for Microsoft Word.  What this means, is that you can now do your SEO research and optimization before inserting the content into your WordPress website.

Check it out:

Not sure what Scribe is?  Check out some of these articles:

• Scribe SEO’s New & Improved Features
• The Only Paid SEO Tool I Use
• 10 SEO Tools for Photography Keywords

or visit the Scribe website for more details.

If moving from a non-self hosted website to self hosted, is there any way to not lose what SEO ranking you already have? (In my specific case, moving from Zenfolio as the host back to a self hosted WordPress site with Dreamhost.)

Great question, Barb. This answer is two-fold, especially because of the platform you’re moving from. I’ll answer the more important part first. Whenever moving a website, if the URLs are changing (which they will be for you), then you need to implement 301 redirects which tell the search engines that the link has changed permanently. This forces all the SEO efforts you’ve made to remain on the new website.

The problem you will face is that services like Zenfolio and SmugMug use random numbers and letters in their URLs. That means you will have a lot of 301 redirects to make if you want each photograph URL to rank well. There is a WordPress plugin, called Redirection, that can get the task done for you, but you will need a complete list of all the Zenfolio generated URLs to get going.

Barb also asks:

Is there a way for the general consumer to compare photo hosting/selling companies (Smugmug, Zenfolio, Photoshelter) and the SEO services they offer? They all say they optimize your SEO. But how much and how well? And let’s exclude blogging from this question, as only Zenfolio has built blogging capability.

I do not know of a website that compares the SEO features specifically most likely because that’s not their main selling point. They all do provide some form of SEO features, but they are all limited. For example, certain services do not let you specify the URL for every page, or create a custom meta title and description. Also, some do not have an easy way to do internal linking or even let HTML in a photo description.

I am not saying those services are bad, because they do have their importance. I am saying that if you want complete control over the SEO of your website, then another website system could be a better option.

Scott

This question was asked following the SEO for Photographers discussion on the jpeg2RAW podcast.