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.

This post is from guest blogger, freelance editor, & my lovely wife, Jennifer “Daisy” Cornforth. Please contact her with questions or for help editing your blog posts, Web content, articles, newsletters, or book projects.

As the wife of a photographer, I read a lot of photographers’ blogs.  Y’all have amazing stories to tell!  However, too often the meat of your story gets lost in a sea of weak verbs, redundant modifiers, passive constructions, and self-focused storytelling.  So after listening to me enumerate the faults of his and his colleagues’ writing, Jon suggested that I write a post to share my suggestions.

1. Read through your piece from the beginning and find the sentence that cuts to the quick. Delete all the gobbledygook that precedes that sentence.

2. Take out unnecessary words. Phrases like the fact that, it seemed that, I thought that, it felt like can almost always be dropped and result in clearer, stronger writing.  Likewise, most intensifiers can, and should, be dropped.  Very, so, really, extremely, completely and the like add very little to your story.

Not so hot: It is with great appreciation that I would like to announce…
Warmer: It is with great appreciation that I announce…

3. Excise the verb To Be. Is, was, were, and are bore the reader. There is usually a better way to construct a sentence than by using is.

So-so: There are two black eyes staring back.
Better: Two black eyes stare back.

4. Replace wussy verbs like to have and to be with action verbs.

Uncool: I was running through the woods, and I had my pack in my hands.
Better: I ran through the woods, clutching my pack.

5. Replace passive constructions with active ones. Passive constructions include phrases like “The suitcase was packed by me.” as opposed to “I packed the suitcase.”

Annoying: The truck was driven up the winding road and was parked by the ledge.
Far better: I drove the truck up the winding road and parked it by the ledge.

6. Weed out unnecessary, flimsy, and distracting adverbs. Take a discerning look at every –ly word on your piece.  Most adverbs either (1) prop up weak, overused, or vague adjectives or verbs, or (2) attempt (failingly) to provide additional information.  Better word choices and adequate factual information remove the need to beef up writing with adverbs.

Worse: The air was extremely hot.
Better: The air was scorching.  (Better word choice.)

Worse: We ran quickly up the trail.
Better: We scurried (dashed, bolted, flew, rocketed, planed) up the trail. (More precise word choice.)

Worse: The trail was completely impassable.
Better: Torrential rain had flooded the trail the day before day, knocking out all three footbridges, and leaving the trail impassable. (More information.)

7. Don’t tell the reader how to feel! The most consistent and irritating problem I see with photographers is that they tell the readers what to see, think, or feel, rather than showing the reader the scene and allowing the reader to generate their own feelings.  Phrases like you feel a surge of awe as you, it is breathtaking to see, and one is shocked to find weaken, rather than strengthen, the reader’s emotions.  Use words to paint the picture, and allow the reader to decide if it’s breathtaking!

Cloying: No one can deny the surge of sympathy you feel when you see these tiny chicks cheeping alone on the outcropping.
Better:  The tiny chicks cheep-cheep-cheep, abandoned on the outcropping.

8. Flesh out the story with details. Don’t say, “The road was long.” say “The road stretched 20 miles.” Don’t tell me “the sunset was very, very, extremely gorgeous,” describe how the light reflected off the surroundings, what the air smelled like, what the colors resembled, or how long it lasted.  Fight the temptation to cop-out with adjectives.  If you say something was short, the reader wants to know “How short was it?”

9. Use tropes to describe the indescribable. The images and environments in your stories are outside the realm of most people’s experience.  So help the reader “see” more clearly by using metaphors, similes, and other tropes they can relate to.

Run-of-the-mill: unbelievably pink sunset, beautiful fluffy clouds
Punchy: a flamenco pink sunset, clouds like cotton candy

10. End sentences with a bang. The natural emphasis of a sentence falls at the end, so make sure your last word is worth emphasizing.

I saw, leaping out if the river, hundreds of sockeye salmon. (Emphasizes salmon)
I saw hundreds of sockeye salmon leaping out of the river. (Emphasizes river)

Use the last word to set up your next sentence, to underline your point, or to crystallize the perfect image.

This is a picture of my boat, Serenity, anchored in Lituya Bay in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska this past June.  It is a 22′ C-Dory Cruiser that I purchased in April 2007.  My wife & I bought it for our family, but also for my Alaska photography cruising ambitions.  My dad & I almost immediately motored it up the Inside Passage in May 2007.  (I grew up sailing on the Great Lakes in Michigan with him.)  After spending so much time and money to get it up to Alaska, I decided to leave my boat up there that first winter (07-08), which then became another summer & winter (08-09), and it is now headed into its 3rd winter.  Even if I had it down here in WA during the winter, I probably would not end up using it all that much.  So, it has stayed in Alaska.

Last week, my friend and fellow photographer Florian Schulz helped me pay to ship my boat & trailer from where it has been based in Juneau to Yakutat.  Our plan was to fly there this past Sunday and use it to visit Yakutat Bay, the Hubbard Glacier, & Icy Bay for the last 2 weeks of August.  All of these locations are situated at the top of the Gulf of Alaska on the southern edge of Wrangell St Elias National Park.  The park is the largest in the US National Park system and contains the largest ice-fields in North America.  Very few photographers get the chance to visit this area, so the opportunity for unique photographs is almost guaranteed.  Unfortunately, the weather turned from really nice to out-right terrible this week and we have decided to cancel our trip.  Both of us have spent enough time in Southeast Alaska not creating new pictures due to the rain that neither of us wanted to waste our time being up there.

Take a look at this GOES visible satellite map of Alaska from yesterday.  See the long “fire-hose” of clouds coming from the central Pacific north of Hawaii directly into the top of the Alaska panhandle?  This big storm is the remnant of the typhoon that caused so much destruction in Taiwan last week.  This general weather pattern is also the reason that so many glaciers exist at the top of the Gulf of Alaska.  The area tends to catch all of the big storms that roll in from the North Pacific.  Since my boat is so small, I have to be very conservative about using it to motor around on the open ocean.  For example, it took me over 2 summers to finally be able to visit Lituya Bay under perfect sea conditions this past June.  How long is it going to take for my Yakutat ambitions?

This is the current coastal marine forecast for the area.  It still does not look promising.  In case you do not spend as much time staring at weather forecasts and satellite views as I do, let me share a few of my favorite references.  I pretty much start my day by looking at weather.gov, the main weather site of NOAA.  If I am home in Seattle and thinking about going out to shoot for a day or 2, I look at several different forecasts, but most importantly WA’s visible satellite view.  I want to know what is out on the horizon over the Pacific or on the other side of the Cascades in Central WA.  I use this to anticipate if the clouds might open up and allow the sun to come through at the end/beginning of the day so that I can make dramatic images.  When it came time to fly up to Alaska the other day, I had been looking at the weather forecast all last week and saw that it was deteriorating with this big storm rolling in.  As much as I want to go up to Yakutat to use my boat, I am going to have to wait for another favorable weather window in the next month.  Regardless of whether I get the opportunity, my boat is going to spend the winter in the airplane hangar at the Yakutat airport waiting for me until the weather improves again next spring.  You can rest assured that come next April, I will be staring at the NOAA Alaska weather forecast waiting for a window of opportunity to head up north to use my boat and chase after dramatic landscape photographs.

One final note, if anyone is interested in joining me in Alaska next year, I am planning on getting my USCG 6-pac license this winter so that I can charter my boat out to clients interested in joining me on a unique photography tour.  More information to come in the months ahead.

Last month, I was contacted by a travel video production company in California.  They are putting together a DVD on Patagonia and were looking for a spectacular image to use on the DVD cover.  After searching the internet and even contacting the late Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light stock photography agency, they decided that my image above was the most spectacular image of Torres del Paine National Park that they could find.  I gave them a reasonable quote of $300 for using it on the cover of up to 5,000 DVDs.  I did not hear back from them until yesterday.  Fortunately, they have decided to go ahead and purchase my image, even though their distribution partners are not going to pay for it and had wanted to use some less interesting images that they found on micro-stock sites for $30 or less.  At least in this case, my client decided that the less expensive option was not worth it, but it highlights the tough reality that we as photographers have to deal with on a daily basis.  Is my photography too expensive?  Are there too many options out there for photo buyers?  What is the value of a photo in the digital age?

I checked my Twitter account this morning, followed a link from @FiNS magazine, and discovered 1 of my tiger shark images being used on-line, possibly without my permission.  You can read the article here.  There is no image credit, but it is no doubt mine.  I sent off an email to the London Evening Standard just a short while ago and am waiting to hear back from them.  They could have gotten it from one of my agents like Alamy or SeaPics, or they could have just used it without permission after finding it on the internet.  We’ll see what happens.

Another case in point.  I was in the Seattle REI this past spring.  They sell my mini prints and I have taught photo classes there.  I saw one of my best images of Mount Rainier being used on a promotional brochure for climbing Mount Rainier.  It took a few days, but I finally tracked down where it came from.  It is still posted here, and is apparently free, even though the site says at the bottom in tiny letters something about respecting copyrights.  The only place that this image could have come from was from the Singh-Ray filters blog where I am occasionally featured.  One of my fans, decided to grab the image and stick it on this website without even giving me credit.  The graphic designer that I now work with directly at REI did not see any copyright information (even though it is in the metadata!) so he thought that he could use it for free.  REI did eventually agree to pay me several hundred dollars for using it.

The internet is an amazing tool.  It allows me to travel the world chasing pictures and work from home.  I have spent a lot of time & money modifying my website to the point that it is Search Engine Optimized (SEO).  I now get hundred’s of visitors every day who find my site simply by typing in a Google search for something that I have photographed.  I am fortunate to be able to pursue my dream full-time.  I could be making more money doing something with my degree or the tangents that I briefly followed, but I made a decision that being stuck in traffic and working in an office was not for me.  I am very grateful that I have been able to make my modest career possible, but my biggest concern in the years ahead is, what if there is no longer any value in my photographs?

My friends and peers who have been in the industry for the last 20-30 years are very pessimistic every time that I talk to them.  There is no doubt that the analog days of the stock industry in the late 80’s and early 90’s was great time to be a photographer.  Distribution was tightly controlled by a few agencies.  Can you imagine having to pay several hundred dollars for a basic research fee every time that you wanted to look something up on Google?  That was what you had to do in order to then have original transparencies Next-Day shipped to you.  Next, you had to pay for using the slide, even if you just took it out of it’s sleeve to consider it for mock-up purposes.  My point here is that those days are long gone.  In this era of technology making our lives ever more spectacular, we as photographers need to be vigilant that we are not being taken advantage of, but we also need the search engines to help people find us in order to make sales.

I get requests all the time from people and organizations that want to use my images for free.  If it is a cause I believe in, I usually have already donated money, but I will consider donating an image in exchange for a credit line and I typically ask for at least a small purchase of one of my prints or note-card sets as an acknowledgment of the value of my photography.  Most of the time people agree to this modest request.  One of my favorite questions that I ask designers that contact me on behalf of someone else, is whether they are working for free for their client?  No is almost always the answer.  So why do they expect me to work for free?

I understand that new photographers are very excited just to have any of their images published and almost always give away their work for free.  My only question is, is that a viable business model that I have not yet learned about?  Most photographers just don’t use their heads when they are giving away their work, but unfortunately, they are the rule now rather than the exception.  Royalty free and micro-stock sites are here to stay, even though I can not justify selling images that take me weeks of effort and sometimes thousands of dollars to produce for those prices. On the consumer side, I understand that a whole generation of people has been brought up thinking that everything on the internet is free.  (I personally never downloaded any music until iTunes came out and my computer software is all paid for.)  I recently followed a blog thread by a well-known underwater photographer who had someone copy and make a painting of one of his images and then offer them for sale without his permission.  He politely asked them to stop doing that.  The person did stop, but not before sending him a long nasty email where she kept referring to his photos as “just stock photography.”  Apparently, “just stock photography” now means it is for free.

Tougher times are ahead my fellow photographers, but I wish you success however you may find it.

I want to share some feedback that I received from my peers regarding my previous comments about blogging. My comments are below.

“At the end of the day I am unsure if blogging is something I want to commit to, but I appreciate the discussion about new ways of promoting my work.”

Digital photography and the internet have made it possible for anyone to be a photographer, so it is increasingly difficult to make your images stand out. A nature photographer must be able to create beautiful images and also use every tool available to promote his/her work.

“My blog is 4 years old and my web site has been online for 11 years. It is not a productive use of my time to develop a blog that other photographers are interested in. They are not the ones that I sell images to. They have little interest in my photography, except perhaps to give them ideas of what they might want to go shoot on their own. I am more keen on having regular folks find my web site. They are the ones who buy prints from me. The one area where having a web following might help, even if it is composed of other photographers, is in increasing overall traffic rankings.”

I totally agree with that. I make almost no sales to other photographers. While I do promote my large format printing services and private workshops to photographers they are not my core business. Almost every sale that I make is to a photo editor, art director, or private collector who is not a photographer. I originally set up my blog only to help my website’s search engine results. Blogging is part of my overall web strategy, but it is not the most important part. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a bigger role in my site’s ranking and I intend to talk about that more in the future.

“I have a new blog on my website. I wrote one thing, but never promoted it. I’m still trying to decide if blogging is what I need to spend time doing.”

I absolutely think that we all need to incorporate some type of blogging into our overall marketing and website efforts. At any given time, I know several photographers who might be in locations where it would not be too hard to share their latest pictures, but they do not have a blog to do so. Why not get your work out there faster and build up a loyal following of visitors and prospective clients? At a minimum, every photographer should be adding some new content to their website every couple of weeks to keep the search engines coming back. A blog makes this possible.

“At the end of the day, it is still about building a reputation. There are lots of ways to do that, and the internet is just one way. Magazines are failing daily, and newspapers are screwed. Photographers that figure out and embrace the new reality will prosper faster than those that don’t. Eventually, that’s just how everything will be done. The good news is that I don’t think the train has left the station yet.”

Royalty Free licensing, the proliferation of digital photography, and, more recently, microstock sites have collectively ruined the old publishing business model. Whether a photographer has a long list of publication credits or not is becoming increasingly unimportant for driving web traffic. So how does a photographer make their rankings higher than all the others? A lot of it is now coming down to the content of the photographers blog. Once more photographers get a better grasp of SEO, I believe that it is going to become necessary to create a community of people visiting my site regularly through my blog, in order to get the web traffic rankings and search results that lead to sales.

Since it is snowing in most of the USA, I wanted to feature my image of Bryce Canyon National Park that was created 1 year ago. It was -5 degrees Fahrenheit with 12″ of new snow on the ground. I used my Fotoman 6×12 panoramic camera, Nikkor 105mm lens, Singh-Ray Lighter Brighter Warming Polarizer, Gitzo Basalt Tripod, Acratech Ultimate ballhead, and Fuji Velvia 50 film, at f32 and 4 seconds.

Over the past month, I have been having an ongoing discussion with a number of well known and gifted photographers about different marketing ideas and new outlets for photography. Just because a photographer can capture an amazing image does not mean that it will ever sell. The times are getting tougher; every year there are more and more talented shooters creating beautiful images with only so many places to sell them. Up until about 10 years ago, if you were a photographer and could get your images into a big agency like Getty or Corbis, you could sit back and let them sell your photography for you while you were off doing your photographic thing. Not any longer. Most of the guys that I know who have been in the game for a long time have seen catastrophic declines in their agency sales. Other photographers that I know who were doing great on the art show circuit a few years ago have cut way back on the number of shows they apply to and the amount of driving that they are willing to do to get to them. How will anyone be able to continue shooting professionally without figuring out some new way of making sales?

One question I have been contemplating is, “How much blogging is required these days to be a successful photographer?” Everywhere I look on the web there is another blog-guru-photo guy that has done an excellent job of building up a following of photographers interested in what they have to say, even if their images are not that unique or challenging to create. My fear is that photographers who devote time to working in remote locations, but do not blog regularly, will become an endangered species just like the places and subjects that they photograph.

I usually travel for a few weeks each month which makes it impossible for me to blog every week, but I intend to be more consistent when I am home working. I will add at least 1 blog post each week to my website that will give my readers insight into the photo industry, my equipment choices, and my thoughts about trying to sell photography. I do not intend to become a discussion forum, but I do hope to share some of what goes on before, during, and after one of my expeditions. There are many great websites that offer photography information, and I have no illusions about becoming the go-to guy for everything. What I hope is that you, my visitors, will come back each week not only to read about my recent adventures, but also to learn from what I am doing (both right and wrong) and use it for your own photography ambitions.

The image I chose for this blog entry was created in July 2006 on a remote river rafting trip in the Canadian Arctic. Only about 300 people each year visit Ivvavik National Park in the Yukon, and almost all of them come to raft the Firth River. It is the land of the midnight sun, which means staying up all night to take advantage of the 6 hours of golden sunset light. This image was shot using my Fotoman 6×12 panoramic format camera with my 90mm Rodenstock lens, Gitzo tripod, Singh-Ray 3-stop Soft Edge Graduated Neutral Density filter, and Fuji Velvia 50 film at f22 and 6 seconds. I am in the minority of people still shooting film. I prefer the “life” of film for landscape scenes, plus I own a high-end Imacon (now Hasselblad) drum scanner which already fits into my workflow. I prefer the look of medium and large format landscape scenes when they are printed big compared to my Canon digital cameras. On the other hand, try taking my Canon DSLRs away from me while I am shooting wildlife or underwater images! The detail that is apparent in my 24″x50″ and larger fine-art prints is incredible and more than justifies dragging my anachronistic cameras around for the foreseeable future. I am sure that there are more than a few photographers out there who have not ever shot a roll of film. It’s not for everyone, but it is something different and it seems to work for me and my reputation.