Traveling the Journey of Light | Photoblog Thoughts, feelings, and techniques behind the photography of Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston

When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words - SEO Tips for Photographers - Part IPosted by drfl on August 5th, 2009

When I began this blog I initially thought that I might write articles that would benefit other photographers with some of my past knowledge of technical items. Before I began, I researched the best way to market my work through my blog online. Overwhelmingly, the advice was that other photographers would not be who would ultimately purchase my work. Instead of writing articles for other photographers, the sources said that I should write items that would market my work to those who would buy it, keeping the articles short and simple. So, taking this advice I put away all my technical ideas and went to work on simply showing off my work – uploading a photograph and then speaking about it. Ultimately, I think this has merit, but as you will see through this [technical] article, I now believe that there is perhaps benefit in balancing articles such as this with displaying my images (so if this doesn’t interest you, please return next week). As a result, I am now authoring this to give other photographers a better understanding of what is needed to increase their standings in the search engines.

Why should I give away my “secrets”? I wish I could say it’s completely altruistic, but while there is a bit of that, the main reason is that I have come to realize that very few photographers work in my niche markets, and my hope is that other people will reference this article on their websites and blogs.

I have had a website and a domain name, http://www.journeyoflight.com since 1999. Through this time, I have seen many changes in the way the web functions and what marketing efforts are successful. Since 2001, I have also had the opportunity to analyze Internet traffic reaching my site to see what drives people and what doesn’t and the results are fairly surprising. Through the 3 parts of this blog article, I am going to focus on what I have done that has worked and my mistakes in marketing my web presence. In Part I of this article I am going to focus on some of the basic knowledge required to begin building an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. For these posts, it is recommended that the reader have at least some knowledge of web design and understand basic HTML tags. First, some definitions:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – The process of making one’s site higher in the rankings on search engines such as Google.

Visitor – A person visiting a website.

Hit – A visitor looks at any element on the website – an image, text, etc.

Page View – A view of an entire page - usually composed of many “hits”.

Bounce – An individual looks at one page and then exits the site.

The days of the web in 1999 were much simpler. Google was in its adolescence and by no means was the clear market leader, flash was a novelty, and almost all sites were static web pages. When I began my website, I created a simple site with my photographs and some text.

Pretty ugly, huh? Obviously, websites have evolved and are better, sleeker, and easier to use. The most important thing about this early site was that I had started to collect logfile data on visitors. Although it was not refined at the time, I continued to gather the logs and analyze them, although manually. The information at the time really didn’t help since there wasn’t any real SEO, but that would change.

TIP 1: Have a site where you can log your visits and as much data as you can. Any information is helpful, the more data you have, the better you can analyze your traffic.

Within the next couple of years, search engines began jockeying for position and optimization become increasingly necessary to set sites apart on the fast growing web. The most basic web optimization tips were developed for designers and a large majority first embraced them and then realized they could exploit them. In 2001 I worked with one of the first SEO teams to develop web strategies for a corporate website that I maintained and developed. It was during this time that I learned some a couple of tips that are still relevant today.

Since the title of the page will be what the search engine generally displays, you want to make sure that it makes sense to the searcher. Instead of a list of keywords, it was recommended making a page title such as this: “Derralds Shipping ~ The Leader in Packaging, Shipping, and Delivery”. As you can see, the keywords are embedded, but to the person looking for information, it appears logical and they are more likely to click on it. For today’s SEO, it is now recommended that the most important words appears first, such as “The Leader in Packaging, Shipping, and Delivery | Derrald Shipping”.

TIP 2: Make your page title readable to those who are searching and contain the most important keywords first.

So, Tip 2 begs the question, “What are my keywords?” Why this may seem like an obvious question, the answer is a bit more elusive. In my early website I placed “Color” and “Photographs” and “Photos” all over my website, in the title, on the page, in the “h1” field and metatags (more on this later). This propelled me to the first page under the search “Color Photographs” and “Color Photos” on Google. I thought this would be great and subsequently spawn business.

I waited, and waited, and waited and phone never rang, the emails never appeared. Left scratching my head it suddenly occurred to me - I wasn’t focused on my audience appropriately. Sure, I had color photographs, but of what? When someone is looking for that do they want a landscape photograph? A portrait? A pet photo? Being at the top of an untargeted search did nothing for me, it only made my visitor number high and my page view number low creating a large amount of bounces. Like many successful businesses, I needed to define my niche and expand that niche, branching out slowly. I begin to define my niches – landscape photographs, wildlife photographs, nature photographs, etc. Then I refined those niches even more – “Colorado landscape photographs”, “Nebraska wildlife photographs”, “Canada scenic photographs”. I then expanded upon these terms with synonyms – photos, images, pictures. Anything that I thought someone might search on. I incorporated as many of these terms with as many combinations into my pages as possible. This helped me with my targets, but I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I then found two weapons that would help in my struggle for SEO supremacy (with my targeted words) – Google Adwords: Keywords and the Keyword Difficulty Check Tool.

Google Adwords:Keywords by Google.com

This is a tool designed to show the search volume on Google for various search terms and to compare the popularity of other terms. An example: For my broader niche I did a search on “landscape photographs”. On Google Adwords, the monthly search volume for this term was 8,100 occurrences. Not bad. What’s even more interesting, though, is landscape photos had 40,500 and even more surprising was landscape pictures at 74,000 occurrences. Obviously, the term “pictures” is the more popular method for searching. Using this information, I was able to further refine my keywords to utilize this information.

Keyword Difficulty Check Tool by SEOlogs.com

This is a tool designed to show the difficultly of targeting specific search phrases. The higher the level of difficultly, the harder it is to get a high ranking on the search engines with that phrase. Using the previous example, I inputted “landscape photographs” into this tool to find out that there was a score of “66 out of 100” – moderately difficult. When “landscape pictures” was inputted, it received a score of “60 out of 100” – still moderately difficult, but not impossible. My refined target of “Colorado landscape pictures” checked in at “45 out of 100” – easier than the other two.

My goal at this point now was to put my broader niche terms in the main page of my website and then use the targeted phrases on the pages that contain the images related to the subject. I now have the information that will garner the most hits at the precise images for which people are searching.

Tip 3: Research different phrases for your website. Google those phrases and see how the top pages use those terms in their websites and what other words they may use. Use Adwords and Keyword Difficult Check Tool to research more popular terms or better targets.

Come back tomorrow for the continuation of “When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words - SEO Tips for Photographers”.

Part II is now available at: When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words - SEO Tips for Photographers - Part II