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 IIIPosted by drfl on August 7th, 2009

Concluding this three part series, in today’s post have five more tips to help photobloggers and photographers market their websites and heighten the visibility on search engines.

One point that is stressed often, and I mean often when it comes to Search Engine Optimization is get links pointing to the website.  Once again, get links pointing to the website.  Of course, for photographers looking to market their sites, this seems like a chicken and egg dilemma.  If no one knows the site exists, how do links get created?  The answer lies in actively seeking out related sites that are free that allow profiles with website addresses, contacting other photographers that link, and using other reputable business resources to list the website. 

First, related photography links - Betterphoto.com, TrekEarth.com, and Photo.net all allow free accounts in which you can post a profile.  Within this profile they allow links back a website.  This will add three incoming links immediately. 

Second, links from other photographers.  This usually requires contacting the source to see if they would be willing to create a reciprocal link.  This entails four things:   

1. Making sure that the fellow photographer’s website contains a linking page that can be navigated to from the first page.
2. Making sure that I had a linking page that can be navigated to from the first page. - My website has this page which is visible at http://www.journeyoflight.com/journey06/reciprocallinks.asp
3. Making sure that their work is of high quality.
4. Occasionally checking the other photographer’s pages to make sure the links back are still available.

 
Number 3 is pretty important to me, if I don’t think that their site has visibility or quality, I generally don’t link.  I want to make sure that my reputation remains high and a lower quality site that I recommend may lower that reputation to my visitors.  It hasn’t been much of a problem though, there’s a lot of good work out there!

Lastly, generate incoming links from other reputable sources.  There are many great websites out there that promote businesses.  Most of them want a fee, but some will post a general profile for nothing.  This will usually include a website.  On such resource is Google itself using the Google Local Business Center.   This is a high-quality link that requires a phone or snail mail verification so this puts even more weight on the entry.

Tip #7 Actively seek out links from profiles on related websites, other photographers or business contacts, and from reputable business websites.

Bonus Tip: By using the Google “Add URL” function you can have Google actively spider the page that is sending you the link.  This ensures that if the page is hard to reach due to the structure of the site, Google will still see it and index it.  This will add to the sites that Google knows is linking to you.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph of When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words - SEO Tips for Photographers - Part I, I had always intended this blog to market my new work, to provide my thoughts on various artistic subjects, and to disseminate information regarding upcoming events and products.  Obviously, I have been covering this type of information for over a year and half and have decided to expand the tone of the blog slightly.  I’m still including this information, but I am now including more technical based information for other photographers.  So, how does this help others?  Well, I wouldn’t say I made a mistake with my ideas of marketing my images, ideas, and products, but I would say that the interest and subsequent links might be improved with more diverse information.  To that end, any piece that generates interest (in the pertinent subject) helps achieve higher rankings on search engines.  For that I recommend blogging and blogging a lot.  This doesn’t mean that the posts should be wordy, but descriptive enough to get the point across and keep the reader interested.  Blogs should be concise - exactly why this information has been provided in three parts.  Additionally, at first I had my blog on Google’s Blogspot.  Not a bad service, but it didn’t allow me to customize the site very much and I found that I was not benefiting from the already existing search engine love that my website had.  Once I moved the address to be within my domain name (blog.journeyoflight.com) I found an immediate increase in traffic.

Tip #8: Blog about your area of expertise and niches and keep to the pertinent information.  Try to host your blog within the same domain space.  Market your images, ideas, products, and achievements.  After all you have worked hard to create them.

Once my photoblog was up and running my next step was to market that as well.  At first I did nothing thinking that people would come from my website or from search engines.  I soon realized that this was not doing anything for me.  I found resources such as Photoblogs.org and Technorati.com that were designed to be a directory for photoblogs and joined them. Additionally, as I looked at other’s blogs that were in the same subject I began to comment on them.  This continued to create some exposure for my blog as well. 

Tip #9: Comment on other’s photoblogs.  Join sites such as photoblogs.org and technaronti.com to gain more exposure for your photoblog.  If you get some good exposure you might get listed on Alltop.com as well.

For my final tip, I am going to touch on the topic of social networking.  Many businesses and photographers have embraced Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and the like to promote their businesses.  While I still do not have a Twitter or Facebook accounts, and many do not, I have found I could still take advantage of these networks.  At first I included a button for “Digging” the site with Digg.com.  I had occasionally placed my articles and posts on Digg for exposure.  These submissions would make it higher on Google initially my actual blog that it referenced.  Soon after adding this button my sister-in-law posted some photographs on Facebook with a link to my blog.  This created some good buzz so I wanted to find a way to expand the number of sites that my blog could be submitted to.  After some research I found ShareThis.com which provides a button with all the networking sites and the ability to email or SMS the blog or website post.  I have subsequently added this to all posts and to my main website page and photo pages.

Tip #10: Leverage social networking sites by adding a ShareThis or similar button to your photoblog and website.

While I could cover 10 more tips for Search Engine Optimization for photographers I feel that I hit the high points and hopefully have given some insight into this complex process.  In the future I may expand upon this article, but I will say there is a lot of great information from some sources that are listed below.  By the way, I am not opposed to anyone referencing this article for information or for linking (See Tip #7)!

• Photoshelter SEO Kit for Photographers - A pretty good resource on the high points of marketing photography sites.
• 11 SEO Tips for your Photoblog - A few tips, some covered in my article that provide some good reinforcements.