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How to Get SEO Keywords into Blog URLs

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:32:40 +0000

The following article is a guest post by Zach Prez, an SEO expert with a series of books and workshops designed for photographers. The information presented in this article is written independently of SLR Lounge, and the accuracy of these methods have not been tested by SLR Lounge staff. However, we feel as if the information is relevant and useful for our readers; and as always, we welcome your comments below.

Hey, Zach Prez here to talk about a very specific piece of search engine optimization for blogs. Hopefully you already blog into the wee hours of the morning, describing your photo sessions in equisite detail in order to capture the fascination of potential new clients? New, is the operative keyword. I expect most photographers blog for their existing audience, but blogging with search engines in mind will quickly grow traffic by a factor of 10x. Your same 50 friends will no longer make up 90% of your traffic, but shift to make room for the 50% or more of traffic you should be getting from Google. Let those new clients become satisfied customers and then refer even more business.

I know making a shift to writing for search instead of your existing customers is a tough one to swallow. But keep this in mind. Potential clients don’t go looking for blogs to read. They search for a phrase and find a relevant result – a page talking specifically about the topic they searched. Google finds those topical pages by looking for similar phrases in the keywords of your page or post. All you have to do is get the keywords you think your users are searching for into your pages.

If you’re reading this post, I bet you already know a bit about search engine optimization (SEO). You may think you already know everything about keyword placement and are already doing it. That’s why I’ll focus this post on the last place I see photographers using their keywords. URLs. Google first looks for keywords in the page title, then second it looks to the URL. That’s right, URLs are more important for keyword placement than in the first paragraph of text, images, or even H1 tags. Blogs make it fairly easy to control URLs. I’ll show you how with this excerpt from my latest ebook, Blog SEO Zen for photographers.

Types of URLs

When a user searches for a phrase like Napa wedding photographer (broad keywords) or Ritz Hotel Napa wedding (specific niche keywords), one of the first places Google checks for those words is the URL of your blog page or post. There are 4 parts to a URL:
1. Subdomain name: myblog.blogger.com
2. Domain name: myblog.com
3. URL Path: myblog.com/category/post-name.html
4. Slug: myblog.com/category/post-name.html
Example: napa-photo.com/weddings/ritz-hotel-outdoor-reception.html

Subdomain Names
Google devalues subdomains, which is a shared domain name. A blog using a free domain like mysite.blogger.com should immediately switch to use its own URL or face an extremely difficult time in ranking. The reason is that Google thinks a shared domain is not a serious blog site and may disappear from the web at any time, thus it won’t risk ranking that site in its results.

Domain Names
The domain tells Google and users the main focus of the blog. If your domain name is yourname.com, then Google assumes your site is about YourName, making it more difficult for you to rank for other keywords. A domain name is best suited toward broad keywords that you intend to rank for since those appear on all pages of the blog. Dashes (hyphens) are perfectly fine, telling Google “This is a space between keywords.” By the way, purchasing a domain with quality keywords to forward to another domain does not work.

URL Path
The path to blog pages and posts are generated via a permalink structure. Permalink just means the permanent link or URL location for a blog page/post. Here are some of the ways a blog will generate the permalink structure for a blog post:

Default: myblog.com/?p=123
Day and name: myblog.com/2010/05/23/post-name.html
Month and name: myblog.com/2010/05/post-name.html

No post keywords are used in the default slug, and numbers meaningless to search are used in the paths of the other two. Ideally, the URL would include quality keywords in the path and the slug.

To change this in WordPress (sorry – not available in Blogger or Typepad) go to Settings > Permalinks and select the radio button for custom structure. Enter one of these:

/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%/

The first one puts the post’s first category name into the URL path and the second one doesn’t. For example if your Ritz Carlton post was in a blog category called weddings, the URL would look like this:
napa-photo.com/weddings/ritz-hotel-outdoor-reception.html

Categories are a cool way to integrate keywords into the URL without having to think about it.

Note: By changing the permalink structure, all the URLs in the blog change. Links within your blog should continue to work, but anything linking to your old locations (like from other sites) will be broken. To avoid broken links you need to upload a file to your FTP server telling it the old URL and the new URL for each post on your blog. THis gets rather technical, so hopefully you have a developer who can help you out with that part.

Slugs
Slugs are the keywords in a blog post that appear at the end of the URL, telling Google what the post is about before it even starts reading the text. Most blogs (like Blogger.com) create this automatically from the post headline, but you can click Edit to remove any unnecessary words so that you end up with about 3-7 words, separated with dashes, that describe your post using the best possible keywords for search (not a list of keywords). If you’re a Napa Wedding Photographer like Tinywater Photography, you might update your slug permalink like so:

Post Title: Ritz Hotel Beautiful Outdoor Reception in Napa
Default slug: ritz-hotel-beautiful-outdoor-reception-in-napa
New slug: ritz-hotel-outdoor-reception

So if your using WordPress, remember to update the keywords at the end of the URL to be useful. If you’re using Blogger or similar platform then use quality words at the beginning of the post headlines since they will automatically get added to the URL. Remember that changing the permalink will break any outside links pointing to the post (if you are going back to old posts). I would not advise editing this field for all existing posts, but develop it into standard practice moving forward.

Video Demo for the Above URL Updates

Image URLs

Every image has its own URL, often times helping that image to rank by itself at images.google.com, which can be a secret source of huge traffic for people searching for photos. The image URL also appears in the code of each page where that image is embedded. Using keywords in the URLs to your advantage helps both images and pages rank well, especially for a page that might have 10 posts on it, and 10 images per post – that’s now 100 key phrases in one spot!

Get keywords into the image URL by:

Name the image file properly
Change the default upload location for images

When Google sees hundreds of default named images on your site, it assumes your site is about nothing. Not good for search results. Help it visualize your photos with names like bride-holding-roses-at-ritz-hotel.jpg instead of img004.jpg. Simply describe the photo in the filename. No need to include broad keywords like Napa wedding photographer because your image/post will never rank for it, and when those start repeating across images it looks like spam to Google. Note: I would only make it standard practice to name images moving forward and not spend the time to go back, except for your most essential images and blog posts.
A step beyond a great filename, is choosing a great URL path where the image will live. If you manually upload your images through an FTP location and embed the location in your post, then just make sure your folder structure uses quality keywords in the folder names. If you’re just clicking the image icon to upload the image to your blog from your computer, figure out where that image is being held and if you can customize the location.

In WordPress under Settings > Miscellaneous you can see the default folder for uploading images and change it to a folder that has keywords in the name.

Using the two recommendations above, my future images will change:

From napa-photo.com/wp-content/uploads/image004.jpg
To napa-photo.com/wedding-photos/bride-holding-roses-at-ritz-hotel.jpg

A rockin’ update moving forward considering I post a hundred images a month.

Zach Prez provides photoblog SEO and template reviews. His ebooks and free photography SEO email class have helped hundreds of photographers improve their search engine position to grow their businesses.
Also by Zach Prez on SLR Lounge:
Understanding SEO (That Search Thing) – A Basic Starting Point for Photographers
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Backlinks!

5 reasons wedding photographers should use Craigslist

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:25:14 +0000

The common bond that most wedding photographers share is our humble beginnings. We didn’t buy an office and a client list as a dentist might do. Most of us weren’t lucky enough to inherit a family business. Nor did most of us build a client base, a reputation, and a network without a time of struggle. The duration of that struggle, however, varies from photographer to photographer with some seemingly stuck in it. Some are doing everything they can do to grow their business, while others are relying on luck, wishful thinking, and marketing tips that they learned from a 2 hour DVD.

You’ll probably never hear a photographer at conventions like WPPI giving speeches on Craigslist marketing. Actually scratch that, one photographer who we greatly respect is Robert Evans. During a presentation, Robert actually showed us his very first wedding he shot. He gave us a glimpse of the truth and where his humble beginnings started. The wedding looked so depressing that if every “aspiring professional photographer” saw it, 90% would probably reconsider their choice of profession. It is because of this reason that we so greatly admire Robert Evans. Because we know what it took to get where he is today as a celebrity photographer.

Truth is, showing these events and these humble beginnings simply isn’t sexy. Catering, or should i say, bargaining with budget couples isn’t considered “living the dream.” Instead, the majority of the industry has bought into a dream of $10K weddings and mailboxes overflowing with inquiries through marketing techniques catered to high end brides. It’s not that the photographers promoting these techniques are being unrealistic or telling anything other than the truth based on their experiences. Rather, I think the interpretation and application of these high end marketing theories, coupled with the “anyone can do it” sentiment that’s almost ubiquitous in the industry, have made some photographers unable or unwilling to hustle just a little bit. I’m not implying a lack of work ethic or devotion to their business. But I’m asking, are these people doing everything that they can to grow their business?

We all need to start somewhere and build up; and I think it’s important that we use all of the resources available to us, including free classifieds like Craigslist. There are important rules and tips to follow for creating effective posts dealing with the time of day to post, the content and titles of the post, the cities to post in, and the frequencies of your posts; and I will talk about creating effective Craigslist campaigns in another article. But for this article, I want to focus on convincing those photographers who are just starting their businesses that Craigslist, despite all that you may have heard, is a good resource to help grow your business. So here are 5 reasons wedding photographers should post on Craigslist.

1) Free Targeted Traffic - Almost everyone who clicks through to your post will be 1) looking for a wedding photographer and 2) located in your area (or an area you’re willing to travel to). This seems obvious, but contrast this with an advertisement in a magazine where brides, ex-brides, and wannabe brides are viewing your ad from locations all around the world. To reach such a target audience as the one you’ll reach through Craigslist is any marketer’s dream. And it’s free!

When our studio was posting, we were getting an average of 2 hits per post to our main website linandjirsa.com according to Google Analytics. Two potential clients for the 2 minutes of work for posting is a very good return on investment by anyone’s standards. Contrast that with a $3,500 ad we placed on a large national website where we received around 30 hits a month. Annualized, we probably paid just under a dollar per visit, mostly from brides in irrelevant locations around the nation.

2) Some Mid Range Budgets – While most couples who contacted us through Craigslist were on tight budgets, we had a few here and there who were ready to allocate a fair amount of money for their photography. With the right post, good photography, and good sales techniques, you could land a few $3k to $5k weddings here and there from clients who don’t see Craigslist as a place for budget brides but rather a website they are accustomed to visiting for finding local goods and services.

3) Low End Can Lead to High End – When we first started, we did plenty of 6+ hour weddings for $500 bucks. Ridiculous right? In actuality, I’m sure this is a common story for most wedding photographers. In our case, we treated them like $10K weddings, bringing out the whole team, trying advanced photography techniques, schmoozing with the clients, etc. Just because a bride has a $500 budget doesn’t mean all of her guests do. From one of these gigs, we booked our first high-end destination wedding.

4) Experience and Practice – You can second shoot forever and still not know how to deliver a consistent, high-quality wedding photography product. There’s nothing like learning through the pressure of posing your couple and getting the right shot when a wedding’s running late, getting a crisp shot of a first kiss in a dark chapel, or improvising when equipment seems to act up. Monetarily, these $500 dollar gigs might amount to little more than minimum wage after you factor in a 2 photog team, post production, sales time and delivery of the final product, but the experience is priceless.

5) Book Without Damaging Your Brand – With very good reason, many photographers fear that their presence on Craigslist will affect their overall brand image. For example, you might not want a Google search bringing up your website along with all of your Craigslist postings. Though this is a valid concern, there are certain ways to avoid the potential damage. For example, you don’t have to mention your studio name in the ad. Instead, you can say “click here to view our work” and link directly from the “click here” or link directly from the image collage you include in your post.

Conclusion: I’m not arguing that Craigslist postings will solve all of your problems, or that it’s all you need to be doing. Concurrently with posting on Craigslist, we were putting in a lot of time and effort building our web presence, networking with planners, florists, and other wedding professionals, and most importantly, learning new techniques and improving our skills in order to differentiate ourselves from others in the competitive market of Southern California. After some time, there was no longer a need to post; but I can’t imagine how much longer it would have taken to get our business to its current state without the hustle of posting on Craigslist.

As always, I would love to hear what you think in the comments!

Sandisk Professional Photography Contest on Facebook

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:27:35 +0000

Earlier this week, Sandisk announced their professional photography contents on Facebook. Participants can submit in four categories: Nature, Wedding/Events, Action, and Fashion. Winners receive $1,000; and they are featured in the online Winner’s Circle gallery, while eight runners-up receive $250 worth of SanDisk imaging cards. While the prizes and accolades aren’t enough to change your photography career, it might be a great opportunity for you to showcase and promote your work while gaining some recognition for the art that’s collecting dust somewhere on one of your harddrives.

Here’s the official information:

“Milpitas, Calif., June 8, 2010 – SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), the global leader in flash memory cards, today announced that it will launch a professional photography contest on the SanDisk Extreme Team Facebook page starting June 8. Participants will be able to submit photos in four different categories – Nature, Wedding/Events, Action and Fashion. The Facebook community of SanDisk Extreme Team Facebook fans can vote for their favorite photos, and a SanDisk panel of professional photographers from the SanDisk Extreme Team will review the quarterfinalists and select the contest winners.

The grand prize winner will be offered a one year spot on the SanDisk Extreme Team and the grand prize winning photo will be exhibited in the “Winner’s Circle” gallery showing during the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. The four finalists, the winners of each category, will each receive a $1,000 cash prize and their photos will be featured in the online Winner’s Circle gallery. Eight runners-up will receive $250 worth of SanDisk imaging cards and their photos will be featured in the online Winner’s Circle gallery.

Who: Anyone eligible can enter, but the contest is recommended for professional photographers. Simply complete an official entry form and submit a photograph to the SanDisk Extreme Team Facebook page. See Official Rules for eligibility restrictions and entry details.

When: The contest begins June 8 with a submission deadline of July 31 at 11:30 p.m. PT. SanDisk Extreme Team Facebook Fan users can vote for their favorite photos from August 1 through August 31. The ten most popular submissions in each of the four categories will proceed to the final round of the competition where a panel of professional photographers from SanDisk’s Extreme Team will pick the finalists and then select the winners for each category as well as the grand prize contest winner. The winners will be announced on or around October 31 and the grand prize winner’s photo will be showcased at the Winner’s Circle gallery showing during PhotoPlus Expo in October.

Where: SanDisk Extreme Team Facebook page.

About SanDisk SanDisk Corporation is the global leader in flash memory cards, from research, manufacturing and product design to consumer branding and retail distribution. SanDisk’s product portfolio includes flash memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras and camcorders; digital audio/video players; USB flash drives for consumers and the enterprise; embedded memory for mobile devices; and solid state drives for computers. SanDisk is a Silicon Valley-based S&P 500 company, with more than half its sales outside the United States.”

10 Ways to Make Your Photography Studio High-End

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:28:30 +0000

These days, starting a website or a blog can be as easy as making breakfast. In a few hours, you can have a site up and running for a business with endless options for marketing, branding, and community interaction. But what’s the best way to proceed? I believe in the effectiveness of building a brand name that appears high-end. A high-end appeal increases the perceived value of your services, regardless of how much you are actually charging. So if you’re in the photography industry, here are a few tips for making your photography studio appear more high-end.

1. Post-produce EVERY image– There are surprisingly a lot of studios out there that only post produce a few select images from each event. Make sure you finish your art by post producing all of your images, not only in your portfolio and blog, but also the images in proof books, slideshows, albums, etc. To draw on a popular analogy, a photographer showing non-post produced images is like a chef serving raw food. The ingredients are there, but it’s just not finished. Post production doesn’t have to involve extensive Photoshop work, simple color correction and contrast, exposure, and other adjustments are all that some images need to stand out. If it’s the time it takes that’s keeping you skeptical, software like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will help speed up your workflow.

2. Register Your Business Online – Registering your business on photography directories, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google Maps, and other online resources is important, not only as a means of advertising your services, but also as a way to legitimize your business. Most non-business owners don’t understand the ease of registration, and therefore a business on these directories appear very legitimate, a prerequisite to appearing high-end.

3. Remove Compressed Images Online – Facebook, Myspace, and other online communities and websites are great ways to market your studio and establish a following. However, use links to your blog and website rather than directly uploading to these sites, as the compression of file sizes results in a average-to-low quality display. To go back to the food analogy used in the first point, presenting images in low quality format is like a chef serving food cold. The essentials and the idea are there, but the product isn’t living up to its fullest potential.

4. Upgrade the Blog – First off, if you don’t have a blog, consider starting one for reasons beyond this article. Secondly, make sure you’re using an impressive, custom blog to maximize the effectiveness of the presentation. For example, if you’re using standard displays for Blogger or WordPress, consider downloading and customizing a theme that displays your images in a large format, displayed over a custom background with custom fonts and colors. It takes a bit of time to set up and learn to use these custom blogs, but the time and effort pay off when you’re able to update your fans and clients with your work, presented with the look and feel of your brand.

5. Remove Low-end Images – Any images that appear anything other than high-end should be removed from the public eye. To subscribe to this point, you may have to remove some great shots with your portfolio, but it’s important to remember, anything that appears low-budget can damage the perceived cost of your services, and therefore affect the perceived value of your work.

6. Flash Portfolio – Consider upgrading to a Flash Portfolio, with a large display of your work, a smooth transition from image to image, and a nice song that matches the tone of your work. Photography these days is more than just the product, it’s about the entire experience. If you can get your client to feel the emotion in your images, you’re that much more likely to get the sale.

7. Clothing & Apparel – In our modern world of online shopping and email communication, it’s easy to overlook some traditional aspects of any client-serving industry. Appearing high-end in person is just as important as appearing high-end online, especially in such a referral-based industry. Be conscious of style, trends, and high-end fashion. Also consider buying sleek camera cases and bags, such as the Pelican cases and the Shootsac.

8. Use Official Company Documents – From Contracts to Product Catalogs, everything you send to your client should be presented with a professional, artistic, and branded approach. First off, the mere existence of these official documents adds credibility to your studio; and secondly, the branding and design of these documents can give your studio that high-end, consistent look.

9. Upgrade your Equipment – I realize some third party lenses perform just as well, or even better, than their official brand name counterparts. Furthermore, I believe strongly that a photographer should control his equipment, not the other way around. However, if your client happens to know a thing or two about photography, she may not want you shooting her wedding, corporate event, family portrait, etc with an entry level camera or third party lenses. In an industry where client perception is so important, making sure your client feels like she’s hiring the best photographer with the top-of-the-line equipment is a key to success. If you’re strapped for cash, consider renting your lenses, from anywhere from $15-$50.

10. Google Yourself – Many professional photographers these days have turned their hobby into their passion but have only gone knee deep by keeping their day job. These days, our online profiles are our personal brand, and we have to make sure we are delivering a consistent message. Furthermore, even if you’re part time, you never want to appear part time. For example, if the Google search results for Dave Spectrum return Dave Spectrum Real Estate and Dave Spectrum Photography, with clear relations between the two businesses, there may have problems. Other cases I’ve heard of are photographers being associated with political organizations, religious groups, and other institutions that may alienate certain demographics for their photography studios.

I hope you enjoyed this article, if so, please share the love and feel free to comment and add additional insight below!

By: Lin and Jirsa Wedding Photography, Los Angeles and Orange County Wedding Photographers

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Backlinks!

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:25:20 +0000

Our photography SEO expert and friend, Zach Prez, author of Photographers SEO Book, is back to share some more tips about link building in the photography industry. We hope this information is useful and informative for your photography studio.
After reading our previous post titled Understanding SEO, you know that your best time spent in search optimization is building backlinks – quality links from others sites to your page. This post covers some more tips when establishing links for the purpose of search engine optimization. Simply tips, these are not listed in any order of importance. But very important – create a spreadsheet to track your backlink plan, otherwise you may forget which directories you submitted to, which community profiles you created, and usernames and passwords. Plus if you ever create a second site (or a blog), your tracking list will come in handy the second time around.

Great BackLink Activities for Photographers

Build Links Over Time
Remember that spreadsheet I strongly suggested two seconds ago? Use that spreadsheet to document all of your links, dates, text used in the links, usernames and passwords, contact emails, etc. Plan out a link strategy before you begin the process so you can focus on critical links first and figure out your keywords relative to the site where the link will exist. Search engines value sites more that have a consistent stream of activity, whether it’s fresh content or links coming into the website. Space your links over time because it tells Google that you are not “spammy.” Guess what will happen if you get 50 links in one day, and then no new links for the next month. You may rank high for one day, then disappear into oblivion, or you may even get blacklisted (probably not, but I don’t risk it).
Submit to Easy Link Sources
Cherry-pick easy links from free website directories, local search sites, and business listings. It takes only a few minutes per listing and some appear at the top of search results and can outrank your existing site (like Google Local or Yelp). Be prepared to get contacted by some of these sites that want you to upgrade or buy advertising, so setup a unique email address for those listings. The amount that these listings help your search rank is not overwhelming, so take this into consideration and don’t spend huge chunks of time on this step.
Check PageRank Before Requesting a Link
Lots of people know about PageRank (PR), which is a Google indicator of how important a page is on a scale of 1-10 (you can see PR with Google Toolbar from toolbar.google.com). The point is that Google does not value all links equally and your task is to get links from pages that matter. A link to your site from New York Times (high page rank) is more valuable for your search optimization than a link from a friend’s blog. It is not worth any effort to be linked from a page that has zero PageRank. Typically this is because Google does not find the page valuable (and can sometimes devalue who it links to) and search engines rarely crawl those pages to even see the links and give your site credit. The problem I see most often is that photographers find a site with a high PageRank homepage, and think they are getting value from a link from deep inside this site. Remember it is the PAGE where your link will appear where you want to check the PageRank. It takes many links from PR 1 and 2 pages to start impacting your search rank, but only a few links from PR 5+ pages to see a noticeable change.
Link to Deep Pages
Search engines do not like controlled activity. Example: a photographer establishing a bunch new links in a short amount of time that all point to its homepage. In reality, the most popular sites will have real users linking to many different pages of the site, and not just the homepage. When building links, it is best to link to multiple pages to avoid being seen as spam-like activity. Impress Google by mimicking human nature and link to subpages of your site, like galleries or blogs.
Use Multiple Anchor Texts
Search engines look at the words in the hyperlink (called anchor text) to understand what the website will be about. It values these words more than the words that are on the site itself, because these words span many other websites and are less likely to be manipulated. It is very important to use highly searched keywords within the links that point to your website. For example my blog might have a link to my main website that says “San Diego Wedding Photographer” instead of “www.mydomain.com” because I want Google to know my site is about San Diego wedding photography. If you read the previous tip, you will understand that the normal process of linking would not produce the same anchor text in all of the links pointing to a site, so change your keywords slightly from link to link to “act natural.” This will also help you rank for similar keywords that users might be searching.
Build Profiles in Communities
Do a search to find forums and communities for photography or your specialty and start a profile. Put your website in your profile and in your signature (remember to use quality anchor text, and different anchor text in each forum). Every time you participate in the community with a post – your name will link to your profile (which will link to your site) and your signature will link to your site. All of these links; and you only have to set it up once. You will get great value from your new network at the same time.

For more tips from Zach Prez, Check out his e-book, Photographers SEO Book. It provides a step-by-step guide for improving your search rank. It provides a simple formula for finding your key phrase, an optimized splash page text example, plus a list of places where photographers can get free links.

Good luck and if you have any comments or additional ideas, please list them below!
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Written by Zach Prez, author of Photographers SEO Book (Edited by Lin and Jirsa Photography)

Understanding SEO (That Search Thing) – A Basic Starting Point for Photographers

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:18:59 +0000

For this entry, we asked our Photography SEO expert and friend, Zach Prez, author of Photographers SEO Book to share some insights on how to get started on SEO in the photography industry. Enjoy!

Search engine optimization can provide your website a constant stream of new photography clients. SEO for short, has been my home for many years, as I’ve helped many photographers improve the search engine ranks of their websites. This first post starts very general for beginners with simple background. I’ll explain a little about SEO, the two basic techniques (Yes, just 2… I told you I would make it simple), how search can help your business, and how to get started. Feel free to ask specific or more advanced questions at the SEO Q&A web page or check back for future posts.

SEO Defined: Search Engine Optimization is the process to improve your sites ranking and placement on popular search engines. SEO involves making minor adjustments to your website in an effort to appear higher in search engine results. I’m talking about the non-paid, sometimes called organic, links that appear down the middle of the search results page. The paid sponsored links that sometimes appear at the very top or right side of search results is a different subject called SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Google Ad Words). I use “search engines” and Google interchangeably. Google captures over 60% of the US searches, and if your site ranks high in Google it also typically rank high in the other major search engines. Do yourself a favor and focus solely on your rank in Google. To get there, learn a little bit about how it works.

The Starting Point of SEO: The Two Primary Components

Google’s ranking process uses an algorithm that is extremely complex and in many areas compeltely secret. Furthermore, it is always changing. But, the fundamental principles are commonly known. Two basic SEO techniques take advantage of these principles are 1) text on the page and 2) links to the page.

1) Text on the Page – Keywording Page Content

The goal of keywording your page content is to match your page text to what Google users might type into a search. Google returns the best results by looking at what a user typed into search, then finding web pages that use those same words. If you are a San Diego based commercial photographer, then placing the keyword term “San Diego Commercial Photographer” throughout your site content is key to being recognized as such by search engines. Google looks for words from the search phrase in a number of places on the web page including:

The URL of your site (domain name)
Your site title, description, and keywords (meta data)
The text words on your site

So, now we know that when a user searches for something like “San Diego Commercial Photographer,” Google looks for web pages with that specific keyword content. This keyword comparison makes up the minority portion of the search engine ranking process. However, developing the appropriate keywords within your content should be the first thing you approach when optimizing your site for search engines.

2) Building Backlinks – Quality Links From Other Sites to Your Page

The ranking portion of Google’s process looks at the links (commonly referred to as “backlinks”) coming into your page from other websites. Google ranks sites higher that have lots of links pointing to it, since it figures that sites that have lots of external references must be of higher importance and value than those that don’t. Some factors that go into how well your site ranks include:

The number of websites linking to your site
The popularity and importance (otherwise known as Page Rank or PR) of the websites linking to your site
The link text used in the link anchor tag itself

Building quality inbound links is defintely the more difficult and time consuming portion of our two basic steps to SEO. A few link ideas to help you get started include getting listed on partner websites, local websites, directories, etc.

Advanced Techniques – The Social Media Photographer

The above is plenty for the average photography business, but by no means comprehensive or in depth. To give you an idea of a more ideal and complex search optimization strategy, take this social media illustration.

Add a blog and forum to your website, as well as Twitter page where you can promote and invite others to join, comment, and contribute. Interlink your sites appropriately in addition to writing articles or blogs for others websites (that link back to yours). Put buttons on your pages that make it easy for users to share and save your pages via social media bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious and more. Post your well-tagged photos and videos to multiple sources. Assuming you did the right keyword research ahead of time, all of these activities create web pages with many different content types that are rich in keywords and lots of backlinks – all the things that search engines love.

The Time Commitment

Before you get heavily into improving your sites SEO, it is important to go into it with the right expectations. SEO is a long process and in the best of circumstances can take anywhere from 12-18 months to begin yielding solid results if your industry is already full of online competitors (which photography is). In addition, if you want to yield results in a 12-18 month period, expect to spend a good month preparing your website content, and around 10-20 hours each week thereafter doing activities to seek out quality inbound links. Obviously, the amount of time that you put into this area will directly impact the amount of time it will take you to get onto Google’s first page of organic search results for your respective keyword.

Because SEO is such a time consuming process, this area of the business is often outsources to companies that specialize in this area. However, regardless of what you hear, never believe anyone telling you they can “Guarantee your site on the first page of Google’s organic search results within 6 months.” Any SEO professional will tell you that they can never gaurantee a specific deadline or time when your site will appear in the first page of organic search results. In fact, many keywords are nigh impossible to obtain a high enough search engine ranking to appear on Google’s first page of organic search results. It all depends on the industry, and how competitive are your targetted keywords. In general, the more broad your search term, the more difficult it will be to capture a high search ranking.

Benefits for Your Photography Business

The very first search result gets 25% of the clicks! Search is such a competitive space that I would not expect any measure of search engine referrals without a top 10 Google rank. There are too many sites to rank in the top 10 without effort, so at least a minimal amount of optimization is mandatory if you expect users to find you, because they certainly aren’t picking up the yellow pages! Optimize your photography website once for search engines, and expect to spend time maintaining your search engine position for a long time. Imagine the value of promotion the first page of Google search results provides. Tens, if not hundreds or thousands of searchers are exposed to those free listings. Consider what your competition pays for banner ads, paid ads, or event booths. True, these can have ROI, but rarely do they offer the residual client stream that a high search rank will continue to provide. Your website link will appear long after you have completed the search engine optimization process – free advertising. Consider how much time, effort, and money you’ve invested in your website. Don’t let it become a billboard in the dessert. Invest a percentage of your time or budget toward website promotion so that your beautiful website can be found. In my case, I spend about 10 times more energy promoting my website than on the site itself. Many times you win a new client from the promotion alone (or search result title, as it were).

Get Started with SEO The best thing you can do is start simple, check your results, then build from there. Focus on developing one important phrase that you want to be found for in search engines, then experiment with some of the basic optimization techniques to see if you can improve your rank for that phrase. For example, use that phrase in text on your homepage and then after a week or two see if it made an impact on your Google rank. Then begin building quality links back to your site and check again to see what impact that has made. In some cases you may have a photography niche or a location that does not have a lot of search competition and your optimization efforts will quickly be fulfilled. Sometimes phrases too competitive to rank for and you may have to settle for something more unique, or in a less populated location.

If you’re looking for additional information, you can check out Photographers SEO Book. It provides a simple formula for finding your key phrase, an optimized splash page text example, plus a list of places where photographers can get free links – everything you need to get started without a heavy investment.

Good luck and if you have any comments or additional ideas, please list them below!

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Written by Zach Prez, author of Photographers SEO Book

Optimize Your Images for Search Engines

admin — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:49:18 +0000

Here’s a tip for building traffic to your website: Optimize your images for search engines. Most artists don’t take advantage of this, and all it takes is a little extra effort each time you add an image to your site.

Search engines work mainly off of text and links. Because of this, search engines have a hard time reading images. They can do it, but not effectively in all cases. There are things you can do, however, to help your images show up on the search engines.

Why would I want my Images on the Search Engines? Of the hundreds of millions of searches that are done online each day, about 15% are exclusively for images. Think about that. If you are a painter, photographer, or other image based artist, your work could potentially be seen by hundreds, or thousands of people each day if you know what you’re doing. Copyright issues aside, you want your images to show up where people are looking, so you can attract more customers, gain notoriety, and make more money!

How to Optimize Your Images

Name your files – Most people save their images with file names like “photo1235.jpg.” When they upload the file to their website, whether it be a blog, Flickr, Etsy, Imagekind, or other site, the image file shows up as “www.site.com/photo1235.jpg,” which doesn’t tell the search engine anything about the photo. Name the file with descriptive text. If you are a wedding photographer, try something like “John_Smith_Wedding_Banquet_Hall_Name.jpg” and you will find your file being read and understood by the search engines.

Use Alternative (Alt) Text – Most sites with a visual editor, like Flickr, WordPress, or Imagekind, allow you to plug Alt text into your photo. If you know what keywords you want to show up for online, then this is the place to plug those keywords. Again, similar to the file naming, you might try Alt=”Los Angeles Wedding Photography Bride & Groom Photo” Limit your description to 50 characters.

Talk about the images on your page – Search engines will often pull information on images from the text around the image. If you are posting an image, make sure you talk about it a little bit. For example, you might post a photo of a wedding dress on your blog, and in the blog post put a paragraph describing who wore the dress, who designed it, and how you shot it.

Bigger & Better is better – Larger images rank better than thumbnails. Google claims that they can check the quality of focus and exposure in photographs and scanned images. In other words, better quality work is recognized by Google. Remember to balance your file sizes. Larger images may rank better, but a slow load time will kill your rankings.

Color, size, and type filters - The search engines are getting smart. If you are selling prints or other products with your images, this is especially important. Make sure you use color (R,G,B, etc) and size specifications (600×400, 150×150, etc) in your image descriptions (on page and alt/file names).

Have a social media presence – Sites like Flickr, Picassa, Imagekind, FolioTwist, Facebook, and Myspace are huge sources of traffic by themselves. People search for images there. Pick one or two of these sites according to your style & genre and create a presence there. Make sure your social media pages point back to your main website so you can let people know you are a professional.

Leave questions or success stories related to image optimizing in the comments below. Have a great day!

Cory Huff works for a search engine marketing firm in Portland, Oregon and also runs the website TheAbundantArtist.com where he teaches artists of all kinds how to sell art online.

Cory Huff
801-809-0237
Follow me on Twitter: http://Twitter.com/agoodhusband
How artists can make more money: http://TheAbundantArtist.com

Top 10 Ways to Market Your Photography Studio Online

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:12:03 +0000

How many cold calls a week does your studio receive from SEO or marketing “specialists?” How many online magazines, blogs, and directories have tried to get you to pay thousands of dollars for banner ads or “premier listings?”

With thousands of ways to advertise online, it may be difficult to find legitimate, effective, and targeted forms of advertising. First and foremost, it should be mentioned that the most effective form of growing your business is still the old-fashioned method of word-of-mouth referrals. Whether you have wedding planners, past clients, or friends of friends raving about your studio, nothing is more effective than direct word-of-mouth testimonials. We will cover methods of maximizing these resources in another SLR Lounge wedding photography tutorial; however, this article will focus solely on online forms of advertising.

The rankings below are based on the highest total scores; and the scores are based on the following factors:

The ease of implementation – This rating has to do with the time and knowledge required to get the method up and running. (Hard=1, Average=2, Easy=3)
The time it takes to yield results – This rating has to do with the speed at which the results begin to materialize (Slow=1, Average=2, Fast/Immediate=3)
The cost – This rating is the monetary cost of the method (Expensive=1, Average=2, Free/inexpensive=3)
The quality of leads – This rating has to do with the quality of the leads generated based on a variety of factors, including budget, location, demographic, and other factors. (Poor=1, Average=2, Good=3)
Additional Factor – An additional -3 to +3 score is added or subtracted to and from the total score to account for additional factors associated with each specific method.

Top 10 ways to Market Your Photography Studio Online

1. Facebook – Facebook is number one on our list because it bridges the gap between the most effective way of growing your business, word-of- mouth referrals, and online social networks with one of the largest, most up-to-date online communities on the web. Essentially, everyone in your network needs to be current with your work. It’s not enough for your friends and family to simply know that you do photography. They need constant reminders; and they need to all become true fans in order for them to actively engage in promoting your business. Facebook is perfect for advertising within your network, with tools like status updates, fan pages, and a calendar of events. Update your status when you finish posting your images, start a fan page for your business, and invite everyone to any photography exhibitions or events you hold. Consider asking your friends to ‘suggest’ your fan page to their friends and add every person you come in contact with, expanding your reach.

The ease of implementation: Easy = 3
The time it takes to yield results: Fast=3 Facebook gets you started immediately with the ability to import your contacts from other networks like Gmail and Twitter. Your friends list will grow quickly, and with it, awareness of your photography studio.
Cost: Free=3
The quality of leads generated: High=3 People who find your work through Facebook will likely be a friend or a friend of a friend, high quality leads.
Additional Factors: none
Total Score: 12

2. Search Engine Local Listings & Maps – Google Maps and other local listings in search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo search are gaining importance in the world of search engines, as they appear before actual search results.

The ease of implementation: Average=2 Registration is simple, with basic online forms. However, confirmation can take a week or so, depending on how fast you receive the confirmation letter and input the confirmation code.
The time it takes to yield results: Average=2 Depending on where you live, your studio could come up on the first page or not at all. In Los Angeles, for example, your listing may not show up for a while, if at all, depending on the content of your listing and a variety of factors. This requires some level of Search Engine Optimization research and implementation. On the other hand, in Provo, UT, you’re likely to be on the first page with the right content. The variance puts this factor at a score of 2.
Cost: Free=3
The quality of leads generated: Good=3 People finding you through these listings are going to be local and targeted
Additional Factors: none
Total Score: 11

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – If this were an easier and/or shorter process, this would be number one on the list, as it leads to very high quality and relevant leads. However, the process is very cumbersome, as it involves optimizing your pages, link building, and a whole host of long-term processes. Despite all of the work, SEO should be a constant process that will eventually pay off.

The ease of implementation: Difficult=1
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1
Cost: Varies/Expensive=2 It can cost you nothing if you do all of the research and implementation yourself. However, if you aren’t designing and programming your own website, you’ll have to pay your webmaster to implement changes, and you might hire an expensive SEO consultant.
The quality of leads generated: Good=3
Additional Factors: +3 An additional 3 points is added to this method because of the high amount of relevant traffic this method can deliver
Total Score: 10

4. Adwords and similar Paid Advertising Services– Google Adwords and other similar services are good ways to advertise online. You can target your customers with precision based on keywords searched, location, and other factors. However, effective implementation can be a lot of work and the costs can quickly exceed the benefits if your campaigns aren’t well planned and monitored.

The ease of implementation: Difficult=1 Setting up your Adwords account, creating your campaigns and managing your keywords is a long process that requires constant management and planning
The time it takes to yield results: Fast=3 Your advertisements should start appearing immediately
Cost: Average=2 Depending on your location and keywords, your cost varies widely.
The quality of leads generated: Good=3
Additional Factors: none
Total Score: 9

5. Image Searches, Flickr & Other Free Online Image Sharing – Believe it or not, some potential clients are actually using services like images.google.com and Flickr quite often to search for wedding ideas, venues, and photographers. They might find your work there and fall in love with your style. Make sure your images are optimized and linked directly to your blog or portfolio.

The ease of implementation: Average=2 While it’s easy to add images to your blog, your site needs to be optimized for search engines and you may need to do some research of image naming conventions. Furthermore, it may take some time to upload your images onto some of these sites.
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1 Google needs to crawl your site before your images will appear in their search results.
Cost: Free=3
The quality of leads generated: Average=2
Additional Factors: none
Total Score: 8

6. Twitter – This service is unlikely to lead directly to booking weddings, but it definitely spreads awareness of your work in the photography, wedding, and general online community. Use hash tags so that people can find your tweets when you post your blog entries; and others will likely “retweet” your “tweet” if they contain useful or interesting links. This resource has the potential to drive a lot of traffic to your site.

The ease of implementation: Easy=3 You can begin “tweeting” immediately.
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1 Although there is integration with Facebook, Gmail, and other services, it takes a little while to build a solid fan base on twitter.
Cost: Free=3
The quality of leads generated: Poor=1
Additional Factors: +1 The additional point is for Twitter’s extensive online reach and presence. While Brides might not be on Twitter looking for photographers, it is a great way to participate in the photography community, gain some credibility in the industry, and establish a following for your work.
Total Score: 8

7. Paid Banner Ads – Paid banner ads are costly; and their effectiveness varies from site to site. In general, the percentage chance of a potential client seeing your advertisement, clicking on the advertisement, and actually contacting you is low.

The ease of implementation: Average=2 You may have to design your own advertisement, which can be difficult depending on your design experience. In other circumstances, the website might design it for you.
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1 It takes a lot of impressions for this method to yield any results, and therefore it takes quite a bit of time.
Cost: Expensive=1. These ads can cost anything from $100 dollars to several thousand, depending on the site.
The quality of leads generated: Good=3
Additional Factors: +1 The additional point is for the notion that these sites are likely to choose their featured articles from their pool of paying advertisers.
Total Score: 8

8. Dedicated Wedding Websites – Weddingwire, PartyPop, The Knot, Wedding Channel, Mywedding.com and most dedicated wedding websites offer anything from free to paid listings on their sites. While it is easy to start free profiles on most of these sites, your profiles often get clumped in with the rest and standing out from the others is difficult. Furthermore, you’re likely to receive repeat cold calls from these sites trying to sell you ‘premium’ listings or memberships.

The ease of implementation: Easy=3
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1
Cost: Varies (Often expensive)=1
The quality of leads generated: Varies=2 If you do happen to receive a lead, you’re often competing with dozens of other photographers for the job, driving prices down and products delivered up.
Additional Factors: +1 and -2 A point is added to this method for its assistance in providing external links to your website (helping with your page rank and your SEO). However, two points are taken away from this method for the cold calls and their lack of reach.
Total Score: 6

9. Photography Directories – Listing on Photography directories is a great way of getting some external links to your websites, but they serve little purpose beyond that. Brides are unlikely to stumble upon these websites, and if they do, you’re competing with the hundreds of other photographers listed on the same site without a good way to stand out from the crowd.

The ease of implementation: Average=2 These are usually simple registration forms, but they may require an exchange of links.
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1
Cost: Free=3
The quality of leads generated: Poor=1
Additional Factors: +1 and -2 A point is added to this method for its assistance in providing external links to your website (helping with your page rank and your SEO). However, two points are taken away from this method for the cold calls and their lack of reach.
Total Score: 6

10. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon – If you have a very interesting article or image, using Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other similar services can give you thousands of visitors to your site. The catch is that there is very little targeting; and it’s difficult to get your article enough votes for good visibility. Furthermore, it’s not enough to simply have beautiful images. Your articles really need to be funny, relevant, and/or extremely interesting.

The ease of implementation: Difficult=1 You may have to contact your webmaster to incorporate the buttons on your site; or you can submit your own articles one by one to each of the sites, a very time consuming process.
The time it takes to yield results: Slow=1 It may take a while for your article to get enough votes for any visibility.
Cost: Varies=2 Listing on these sites is free, but you may have to pay your webmaster to implement the buttons on your site.
The quality of leads generated: Poor=1
Additional Factors: +1 A point is added to this method for its assistance in providing external links to your website (helping with your page rank and your SEO).
Total Score: 6

These results are based on experiences with operating a studio in the competitive environment of Orange County and Los Angeles. Every business has its own niche market, and there is never a universal method of advertising in any industry. If you have any other ideas; or if you have disagreements, please feel free to comment on this article.

By: Lin and Jirsa Wedding Photography, Los Angeles and Orange County Wedding Photographers
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If you’ve found this article informative, please consider donating below:

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Business – The “Long Tail” & Wedding Photography

admin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:27:31 +0000

The popular business book Long Tail, by Chris Anderson details the phenomenon of selling “less of more.” With the proliferation of the Internet, online businesses like Amazon.com and Netflix are able to turn a significant profit from selling low volumes of rare, less-popular, or hard-to-find items, instead of the traditional business model of selling large volumes of popular items.

Wedding photography is anything but a traditional business, and in all honesty, most of the concepts in the book don’t apply. Diversifying our product offerings runs the risk of hurting our brand image and our quality of wedding photography service. In addition, as we talked about in our article “Presenting LESS Not More,” showing too much of our work dilutes the product and overwhelms our clients.

So how can we apply the concepts of “The Long Tail” to wedding photography? Well, in the book, Anderson talks about an important concept that Netflix and Amazon.com utilize very effectively. They both have a very strong, simple, and intuitive system of categorization and recommendations.

As much as we are in a completely different business than online retailers or services, the majority of us are using online proofing to sell our end product. Our balance is between showing too much and not showing something that someone would potentially buy. In general, l do believe that “less is more,” but even then, we’re still dealing with 1,000-2,000 images from a single event. This is when we have to apply the long tail concept of categorization, and we have to separate our images into powerful, simple, and detailed categories, so that our clients and their guests can easily find an image they’re looking for.

For some of you, this might mean making small changes in the way you categorize your images. For others, this may mean actually having to spend the time to categorize your images to begin with. You might even consider separating preparation into bride and groom or separating the reception into cake cutting, first dance, table shots, toasts, etc. You never know what images people will buy, but one thing’s for sure: they won’t buy anything if they can’t find it.

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Article written by:

Chris Lin
Lead Photographer | Partner
Lin and Jirsa Wedding Photography
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Business – Marketing Your Photography Studio

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:35:59 +0000

Recently, we had the opportunity to interview with Tyler Garns about how we started our photography studio. Tyler is an experienced sales person and marketer who is currently interviewing various photographers in order to discover exactly what business and specifically marketing practices, are pushing certain studios into the limelight, while others struggle and eventually die in the dark.

He is using this information to write a book designed to help photographers market their business called Over[Exposure]. While the book won’t be realesed until mid 2009, you can check out all of the informative interviews and articles that will be going into Over[Exposure] on his blog Think Big Art. You do need to register for the blog to view the articles, but registration is free, and might we say quite worthwhile.

So, head on over and check out Think Big Art and keep an eye out for Over[Exposure].

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Article written by:
Pye Jirsa
Lead Photographer | Partner
Lin and Jirsa Wedding Photography
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