These days every photographer on the planet has a website, but very few understand how to increase their site’s visibility. A few years ago, I was in the exact same place– wondering why I did not get more web traffic; but then I learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a set of web design practices that help you build a site that the major search engines will index. I am not a web developer, but I have been able to implement most of these 10 tips on my own, so you can, too.
1. Commit. Longevity plays an important role in search engine rankings. The longer your website has been online, the higher it will rank. My website already ranks well since it has been online since 2001. However, I recently found out that I was being penalized because my domain name was set to expire at the end of each yearly billing cycle. Registering, and paying for, a domain name for multiple years lets the search engines know that your website is permanent. Based on this, I just registered my domain name for 10 years. This will help convince the search engines that my website is legitimate and lead to a higher overall page rank.
2. Optimize your title tag for each page. The meta title is the the title of each page, and it is one of the most important things that search engines use to index your site. Now, look at the top of your browser when you view your website. I bet that over 95% of you have your meta titles set to “Same Old Photography” on every single page of your website. Now, get over your shame, this is one of the easiest things for you to fix. For example, look at my above browser image. My page is about Denali National Park Photography, Photos, Pictures. The first few words are the ones that I want the search engines to find. The “Cornforth Images” part comes at the end, because people searching for my name will find my website easily enough. What I want is for people who have never heard of me and are searching for Denali National Park pictures to visit my website. Finally, when writing meta titles, it’s important not to use more than 60 characters because the rest will get chopped in search engine results.
3. Optimize your meta description, and limit your meta keyword tags. A meta description is the sentence (in black above) that you see underneath every search result that you have ever done. If you are like most people, you won’t click on a search result if this line looks like gobbledegook. A meta description is another easy piece of code that you can add to each page of your website. In 160 characters or less, this description tells people why they should click on your link. Treat it as your sales pitch, which will attract visitors looking for what you have to offer. While you may add meta keywords, these were made almost useless years ago, due to websites spamming early search engines with long keyword lists. It is now recommended practice to only include your top 10 keywords.
4. Use an <H1> tag on each page. Hierarchical tags (<H1>, <H2>, etc) are pieces of code that will further convince the search engines that your page is relevant to your meta title. If you scroll down my Denali National Park Photography, Photos, Pictures page, you’ll see an <H1> tag is used on the big title above my lower-most copy. Multiple hierarchical tags are only relevant for indexing long, written pieces, so one <H1> tag per page should be fine for most photography sites.
5. Use alt tags. Alt tags on images describe the photos to the search engines. Search engines can not interpret pictures, they only index words. Therefore, the more relevant text in your source code, the better your chances are of achieving high rankings. This is my website’s biggest weakness and I need to fix it.
6. Write compelling content for your webpages and make sure that the search engines can “see” it. Are you a photographer that believes that your images speak for themselves? Well, guess what? Your images CAN NOT speak for themselves. The search engines index words, but they can not judge whether your shots are awesome or crappy. To each page of your website, add a few relevant, non-spammy, keyword-dense sentences. Make sure the engines can read the text, which means do not embed it in Flash, or try to hide the text in a same-colored background.
7. Don’t use Flash, and get rid of that splash homepage. As far as the search engines are concerned, a Flash web site is invisible. Search engines can not interpret Flash and graphics, fill out forms, or read JavaScript links and menus. This does not mean that you should avoid these tools, but you will need to provide alternatives for navigating your site. If a page is hidden behind a sequence of drop-down menus, the search engine crawlers will never find it. Make sure that your site has HTML links on every page’s main navigation. In addition, get rid of your pointless splash page! The most important page of your website is the one the search engine first encounters. If that page says, “Click to Enter”, then that is all you are offering the world.
8. Blog & participate in social media. Make sure that you have a blog, that you regularly update it, and that you engage your readers by allowing them to make comments. Blog once or more a week to build up a loyal following of readers. A blog should draw people to your site and help attract a broader audience to your work. This article alone will generate a lot of search engine traffic for me from people looking for “top 10 photography tips” based on the way I used SEO. Every time that you can reference your main website, add a link to it from your blog. How about using Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and other new social networking tools? That is a topic for another blog post, one that I am going to work on soon.
9. Reinforce your website’s reputation with inbound links. With quality content you will eventually be able to generate inbound links from other websites and blogs. If your site is full of one-of-a-kind photos and information, other sites will naturally link to it without even asking. However, it takes time, years even, to build up these links, so don’t expect it to happen overnight. Steer clear of link farms and other spammy schemes for getting links to your site.
10. Include a robots.txt file & install a sitemap.xml. The easiest SEO method that you can employ is to include a robots.txt file at the root directory of your website. This one command will invite any spider that visits your website to crawl all of your pages. You can also install a sitemap, which the search engines can use to index your site. Sitemaps include information such as the date each web-page was last modified, as well as the priority number you give each page of your site. Such a map will help the search engines properly find and link to all of your content.
I look forward to the discussion that will follow this article. I hope that it helps a lot of photographers, and also anyone else looking for SEO advice.
Thanks Jon. I few comments I learned as a Site Manager for some of the largest sites on the Internet:
1. #9 is the single most important factor affecting page rank in both Bing & Google.
2. The second most looked-at thing is the URL itself. If you want people to find you if the search for Joe Smith, then make your URL joesmith.com
3. For the title tag you mentioned in #2, keep in mind that the order of the words in that tag also influence search rank. Engines assume that the words to the left are more important than the words on the right. If you analyze sentence structure, that’s usually true. It’s not just how they’ll display in the results, it’s the actual ranking.
4. Get the link to your site out there in every e-mail, forum posting, blog post, etc. The more it’s out there, the more engines will see it. This is especially true now that search engines crawl social media sites (FaceBook, Twitter, etc)
5. Some hosting sites will resubmit your site map automatically to Google (monthly, etc). More frequently than that won’t help.
6. For longevity, that brings up another point: Don’t expect to see the results of your tweaks immediately. It normally takes 3-4 weeks to start seeing a difference.
7. Dont’ try padding your site with extra text (keywords) on a page that’s the same color as the background. That worked about 10 years ago, but now search engines are smart enough to know when that’s happening.
And finally a request: No matter your personal feelings about browsers, you should test your site will all of them. For example this page doesn’t render properly in IE8. You can force compatability mode with a line of code that will make it render properly.
Thanks for putting this together.
Mark Olwick
Nice list, I’ve never looked into SEO very much, but as a web developer I just realized I’ve been doing all of these things for my site already.
And here is my website, (just for SEO purposes!)
http://adamjacksonphoto.com/
Nice article Jon – all very good points and well written…I’ve managed to nail most of these on my own site, but it’s a never ending process which is why I think your first point is probably the best over the kong haul. thanks!
RRjr
Mark,
Thank you for your feedback. I’ll get my blog guy to add the IE8 format thingy. We did that for Firefox & Safari. Must have overlooked that one. Who still uses IE? What is Windows?
You are totally right about your URL being relevant! If you are reading this, make sure that your URL is something like mine,
http://www.cornforthimages.com/Galleries/Landscape/Alaska/Denali%20NP.htm
You don’t want it to be a bunch of random stuff that does not have anything to do with the topic.
Your #6 is not something I am sweating anytime soon. In the long run though, it will help.
Your #7 is mentioned in my #6 “Make sure the engines can read the text, which means do not embed it in Flash, or try to hide the text in a same-colored background.”
Adam,
Go re-read my #2 suggestion. Your keyword titles are exactly the kind that I was poking fun at. Pick better keywords and optimize!
I have to agree with Mark regarding point #9. Google’s page rank is based largely on the number of incoming links to a site. You can significantly boost your rank by adding a link back to your website everywhere you are online, social media profiles, forum signatures, blog comments, and trading links with other websites.
Another think to consider that you didn’t mention is updating your website regularly. If your site goes for long periods of time without a significant update, you’re losing position with search engines. Websites that update regularly with substantive content are given higher placement than sites that only update infrequently.
marcus,
Ah, welcome to my reality! I’ve not updated my main pages in almost 1 year. It is on my list, however, with the photography related keywords of the places I’ve visited, that does not appear to be making any difference. Look at Ron’s, QT’s, & my site’s rankings. We all have not been to Denali anytime recently, but we dominate the search results for,
http://www.google.com/search?q=denali+national+park+photography&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
You’ve probably got a lot of other things working for you. :)
Exactly!
I wonder how much more or less credit you get for having lots of your own links back to your website on various forums & social sites. That could get kind spammy, know what I mean?
Thank you so much for your feedback.
Good list Jon – especially 9 and 2!
I wonder if I will get a spike in Denali National Park photography hits. :)
Great information here Jon. Thanks for putting this together. Now I need to get to work, it seems :)
Perhaps that should be your point #11, no one thing is going to make or break you when it comes to SEO, it’s a combination of all these things working together that will create the best results.
I don’t think search engines see incoming links as spammy as long as they aren’t coming from banned domains or link farms. If you go and sign up for every social networking site just so you can create a profile with a link back to your site, that starts to get spammy. But if you’re active in a few online communities, especially if they are already well regarded by search engines and/or related to the topic of your website, then having the links back to your site won’t hurt. It might not always help, but it certainly won’t hurt.
Great post, Jon! Thanks.I have more SEO work to do!
Ron, I hope that you & I both get a bump in Denali traffic.
Michael, You & I both!
The feedback that I’m getting has all been great. Most of you have made the argument that the most important thing for high rankings is inbound links. I agree, but unless you do all of the other stuff first, you are never going to get more links.
A good read for sure. I knew some of it, but definitely not all. Thanks Jon!
Thanks for being so generous with your knowledge, Jon! :)
Thanks for putting this together Jon, been working on your tips!
Website: justinreznick.com/
Jon,
Thanks for putting together this list. I’m just in the process of building my own website, and these come in very handy!
Bests,
Jakob
http://www.jakob-berr.com
Your article on SEO is awesome. Thanks!
[...] then, I’ve been reading a lot of great blog posts by other photographers (here and here) on their own search for SEO Zen, as well as reading about it straight from the horse’s [...]
Great post and article Jon! I feel better having read it, as I am part way through a site re-build (of course I will loose the old site seo ranking, but I think that’s worth it).
I paused at this post because of the image though. It grabbed me the other night at SMUG, and it was neat to see it again. I read something you wrote elsewhere (by you) about using grad nd filters and that the reflection should be a bit darker than the subject. Light bulb! That’s why me reflection images never have any pop! So I wanted to thank you for that, and for the notes on SEO. Nice that smug-mug has changed some of their framework to accommodate it!
Jon,
Thanks for the tips! Every little bit of info helps. I knew a few of the of tips you suggest, but there were far more things I could be doing that I didn’t know about.
Thanks again, and thank you for sharing your stunning photography with us.
Take care
Jamie.
Very nice of you to share your hard work with us, thanks for this!
Brian
Great post, Jon! I’ve already started incorporating some of your ideas. Thanks!
Dan