Search Engine Optimisation For Photographers

I’ve built a fair few websites in my time (this one included), and I also take a healthy interest in SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation as it’s also known.

My goal was to ensure this site ranked as high as possible in the search engines for the phrase “London photography”, and if you search for this phrase in Google you’ll see my site is ranked second. I managed to achieve this in just under three months.

I thought I’d write down a few tips for you here to help push your site up the search engine rankings. SEO can be a bit of a laborious process, involving constantly updating your site, ensuring your content contains lots of relevant keywords, and so on and so forth.

First of all, I’d recommend you visit Google AdWords Keyword Tool to see how many people per month are searching for keywords and phrases that you’re optimising for. As mentioned above, I decided to optimise my site for the phrase “London Photography”, and a quick search for the UK reveals that 60,500 people per month are searching for this phrase in the UK, and 90,500 per month worldwide.

The trick is to find a keyword or phrase that a decent number of people are searching for, but not too many

The trick is to find a keyword or phrase that a decent number of people are searching for, but not too many. For example, if you use the Google AdWords tool to search for “photography”, you’ll see that just under 25 million people searched for this phrase in August! To rank highly in Google for this keyword is highly unlikely, so it’s best to aim a little lower to begin with.

So, onto the nitty-gritty. There are on-site and off-site factors that influence SEO, and here they are:

On-site factors – remember, content and keywords are king!

Page Title: – this appears at the top of the browser bar. For example, on the danbiggins.com homepage, the page title contains relevant keywords and appears in the HTML as <title>Dan Biggins Photography | London Photographer – Portrait, Architecture, Landscape Photography</title>.

Headings: – the main heading on my homepage is “London Photography”, and is contained within the <h1> tag. Headings range in importance from <h1> to <h6>

Content: – another important factor, and the main reason why Flash sites generally rank lower in search engines. The content on my homepage again contains various keywords relevant to photography – “I’m a photographer based in East Dulwich, London…”, the regular use of the word “photography” etc. By the way, search engines can’t “read” Flash sites, and thus won’t be able to see the content contained within (this is changing as Flash is becoming more accessible, but a safe bet is to stick with HTML).

Page titles: – I’ve named all my pages to contain the phrase “London photography”, for example, london-photography-blog.html, london-photography-portfolio.html and so on. Separate keywords using a hyphen and not an underscore. Google sees london-photography-portfolio.html as three separate words, but sees london_photography_portfolio.html as londonphotographyportfolio.html. The chances of anyone searching for “londonphotographyportfolio” is small!!

File names: – something which I’ve yet to do effectively but is very useful is using keywords to name files / images. Instead of naming an image “pic.jpg”, use relevant keywords instead – “london-millennium-bridge.jpg” is much better (these words appear in the HTML, so will be visible to search engines). Don’t forget to use the alt element effectively too: <img src=“london-millennium-bridge.jpg” alt=“Millennium Bridge in London, UK” />, for example.

Meta keywords: – To be honest, the meta-keywords tag is becoming less and less important, with Google placing very little importance on it. However, it’s worth putting in as some of the smaller search engines still refer to it when calculating ranking

Off-site factors:

Inbound links: – the more relevant sites that link to yours, the better. For example, if you’ve written an article on a photography site that links to your site, Google will view this more favourably than a link from a gardening site, for example! Also, submit to directories - DMOZ is probably the largest. Set up a profile on Social Media sites too – MySpace, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Write a blog!: – Google loves content, especially sites that add content regularly. So, write a blog about photography – gear reviews, how-to’s, sources of inspiration etc. Allow readers to easily share your content – adding an AddToAny button for example is especially useful. Don’t forget to set up an RSS Feed too!

Add a Google Sitemap – this is an XML file that contains all the pages of your site, allowing Google to crawl and index your site more easily. Drop me a line if you need any help with this.

See what your competitors are doing! – let’s say you’re optimising your site for “New Zealand Landscape Photography” and want to rank highly for this phrase. Simply search for it in Google and have a look at the top 3 ranking sites. What keywords are they using in the title, page titles, headings and content? Who’s linking to them? (A quick way to find out is to type linkto: www.theirsite.com in Google – this will provide a list of all the sites linking to them).

Install a statistics package: – the best way to keep an eye on visitors who are finding your site using keywords you’ve optimised for is to install a statistics package. I use Google Analytics which is excellent – all the info you’ll ever need, and the option to export the data as a PDF, XLS file etc. Best of all, it’s free!

Well, that’s all I can think of for now – hope you find these tips useful!