Photography and SEO… what a combination, right?

SEO is difficult because there are so many other photographers trying to rank for the same keywords. (e.g., NYC Wedding Photographer)

Here is one method to help boost the SEO for your photography website using comments.

Bing and Google use social engagement as a metric for calculating SEO.

• Google uses Google+ engagement
• Bing uses Facebook engagement

One question that I hear often is, “How do I increase social engagement?”

Well, there is no absolute way of doing this.  You can not force people to talk about your website, article or photo.  All you can do is push certain levers to get the gears in motion.

A great example of one of these levers is increasing engagement on your own blog using the built-in commenting feature.  If you’re a wedding photographer in NYC writing an article offering advice for new brides during their search for venues, include a call to action as an attempt to have readers comment.

What does the call to action look like?  It’s not a button – it’s actually a statement or question.

Going along with the NYC wedding photographer example, at the bottom of the article you could include one of these call to actions:

• What venues have you looked at?
• What are your preferred venues?
• Comment below with what you are looking for in a venue.

Increasing engagement on your blog goes beyond getting people to comment.  Once a conversation is started, keeping it going is crucial to this effort.

Marcus Sheridan wrote a fantastic article on Social Media Examiner called 19 Ways to Build Relationships With Blog Comments.  In the article, you will see the simple things that you can do to increase engagement.

What you will find happen (in time, because nothing in SEO is quick) is that readers and commenters will begin to share the articles more because of the conversations. Brides will pin the article on their Pinterest boards and share it with their The Knot friends.

The search engines will see your social engagement growing organically and will begin to increase your page rank.

Now that I’ve talked about increasing comment engagement for your SEO efforts, I want to hear from you.

What are you doing to increase blog comments on your blog articles?  Comment below to share with the Photographers SEO community.

Thanks for reading,

Scott

PS.  Yes, comment engagement is good on your blog, but it’s also good off your blog.  Read Brian Gardner’s 5 reasons why you should leave comments on blogs.

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