So youve got a photography web site and want to get it to the top of the listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The first thing you need to know is to forget Yahoo and MSN. They are losing the Search Engine War and their share of SEARCHES is on the decline. GOOGLE is king and looks set to dominate the market for some time to come. MSNs attempt to build their search feature into Windows has not done anything to increase their market share, rather MSNs share of Search fell to 10.9%, Yahoo had 21.4% against Googles 49%
So lesson number one concentrate you SEO efforts on Google.
Next thing, forget FLASH. FLASH packages a web site in lots of code that Search Engine Spiders/robots cannot read. When a Spider crawls a site it is looking for content text written in plain old HTML. FLASH - forget it.
2nd build your site with Keywords. First thing to do is decide what your keywords are going to be. In the case of SDBPHOTO.COM our keywords are: hong kong photographer/photography. Now the most important place to use these Keywords is first in the TITLE HEADING of the page. So many photographers title their pages Jos Photography Gallery. Now how many people do you think would search for this. Use keyword terms that people will search for. If you are a wedding photographer in Santa Maria. Title your page Santa Maria Wedding Photographer.
You will then want to repeat these keywords again in the metatags: Keywords & Description. While not given very much weight in the SERPs these days, they are still important. Take two sites with the same PageRank, one with MetaTags, the other without. The page with the MetaTags is going to rank higher
Then use your keywords again in the actual body text of the pages. Beware not to use them too many times. This is called Spamming and will get your site booted out of the SERPs, you dont want that. Use a Keyword Density Analyser to check the density of any given keyword in relation to the rest of the content on your site.
When building your internal links, the text you use in the anchor is also important. Try using the page title as the anchor text when you create your links.
And a few more tricks I have up my sleeve that I am not going to give away as my competition is sure to be reading this.
Internally the structure of a site is very important to the way a SPIDER crawls your site. Built properly a site with a lower PR will outrank a page with a higher PR, purely due to the structure of the site.
The most important determination of PageRank is how the site is linked to the rest of the web. INBOUND LINKS are king. The more the better. Trading links with other sites is a common way to build links and many SEO specialists spend lots of time and effort cultivating links with other sites. But not all links are created equal. Link Farms are sites that have been created purely for the purpose of achieving higher PR, Google does not like LinkFarms and sites have been know to be penalised for participating in LinkFarms. Be sure to screen your link partners carefully. A well optimised site with a number of good quality inbound links is what we are aiming for here. Linking from sites with higher PR will result in a higher PR for your site. It is all based on the theory of votes to your page. Google, how de mo crat ic (dont want to get censored) of them now if they only could get the Chi knees to vote
Of particular interest will be how you tag (file name) the photos on your site. The logo on my site which appears on everypage called from the server is named with my keywords. If you have a gallery site with many pages, you should have each page linked back to the index page of your site with your keywords as the anchor text.
Good sources of SEO info, forget any books, by the time they get to the presses the info they contain is dated at best, obsolete at worst. The web has a wealth of SEO sites and user forums. Good ones to check are:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Of particular interest to photographers http://www.webmasterworld.com/ has a section on PPC (pay per click) advertising. PPC for photographers will be covered in the next chapter.
With your site ranking high in the SERPs people will be able to find you and your business will grow.
Since achieving #1 position for my keywords about a year ago, this site has gone from 80-100 visitors a day to currently receiving 250-400 visitors a day. Most importantly our non-web business has increased by at least 50%. You could not buy the publicity that #1 in Google brings to a site in a highly competitive market such as Hong Kong.
To close. My site has been live for a little over four years. It was only late in 2004 that I took an interest in SEO and started the climb up the SERPs, it took a little over six months to hit #1 in Google, we stayed there for about 6 months and then were bumped to #3, a reworking and revision of the site as well as the cultivation of some more links and we were soon back in #1 where we have been for the last 9 months. This site is PR 4 and has over 500 inbound links, and has indexed more than 3000 pages and building
Sean David Baylis is a Professional Photographer working in Hong Kong and around Asia. http://www.sdbphoto.com is a labour of love for Sean. In addition to a keen interest in Photography, Sean has fallen in love with the art of Search Engine Optimization. Its like chess with 1,000,000 pieces. If you would like to hire an SEO expert to optimise your site, please contact me sdb@sdbphoto.com.
