Quirky Bird Blog

Photography sites are amazing places, full of beauty and poignant moments. It’s a place where photographers show their stuff, and these days is just as important as having business cards.

The standard in Photography sites is flash, since it’s the most effective way to show motion display portfolio with music. The problem with flash – it’s search engine suicide.

A little about Google:

Google is like a blind man. When he comes to your site, he scans it for text like he’s reading braille. If your site is flash it’s like showing a movie to a blind man and saying ,“This is what we do” to which he replies, “I can’t see that, I’m blind for goodness sake.”

This is why a photography blog is so valuable. This is where you can actually use search engine tactics to generate traffic, because pretty much everything you do on your flash site is useless from a search engine perspective. Here is an overview of some common mistakes in photography websites and blogs as well as how to do it right.

Mistake #1 – Crazy long runaway meta tiles.

What’s a meta title? Here are a couple of screenshots of two places it will show up:

Your meta title should be short, sweet, and to the point. Ideally, less than 140 characters – like a tweet (twitter). Some search engines won’t read past 80 characters, so make sure you put the most important information first.

Do some keyword research to figure out what the best phrase is for you. Are you trying to get gigs in a specific area? Neighborhood? City? County? Include that in your title. This is probably going to be a more valuable option for you than listing out all of your various services (family, baby, wedding, senior, birthday, first pair of socks, you get the idea). The only reasonable time to list your services in your default meta title is if you only offer 1 or 2 services. For instance, if you only do wedding photography, you should make sure to include that in your title (like San Diego Wedding Photographer).

What not to do: Family, baby, senior, and first pair of socks photographer san diego, oceanside, north county, carlsbad, staci brillhart

What to do: San Diego Photographer Staci Brillhart | Quirky Bird Photography

Notice I put the business name last. You really only need your business name on your home page. No one is googling for your business name unless they know of you – they’re instead googling for a photographer and they probably don’t know you exist. You will always show up #1 for your domain and business name, so don’t waste this valuable real estate on your business name.

Mistake #2 – Splash page insanity.

So because you probably have a flash site, my guess is you have a splash page. What to do with it?

If you really want to know my honest opinion, it’s to get rid of your splash page. Have them dump directly into your portfolio site. Link people to your facebook and elsewhere via the blog, and make sure that both your blog and portfolio site are easily toggled in and out of. Put all of your SEO energy into your blog – that’s going to be the best place to get real traffic. Just make sure that your meta titles on your portfolio site are proper, and you may consider adding a bit of text under the flash. Nothing fancy, just a little bit about the types of services you offer and more information about your area.

If you want even more SEO cred – put your blog on your .com and link to your portfolio as a separate directory (yourdomain.com/portfolio) or as a subdomain (portfolio.yourdomain.com).

Mistake #3 – Naming your links something cute instead of something straightforward.

So I know you were thinking when you decided to call your page links in your blog and website something cute or different, you thought you were setting yourself apart – but what’s actually happening is you’re confusing your potential clients. Ditch the cute or different names in place of something straightforward. You’ll get major usability points for this. No one should ever click on a link out of curiosity of what’s inside, they should know exactly what’s inside before they click.

What not to do: Call your pricing “investments”. Is this for investors? Or am I investing in you? Is this a long term investment? Will you need to see my financial portfolio?

What to do: Call your pricing Pricing or Rates. When in doubt, KISS it. Keep It Simple, Stupid. I tell myself this at least once a day.

Mistake #4 – Not using your newsletter to it’s potential.

Getting people to subscribe to your mailing list results in virtually free advertisement. Promise a small coupon on sign up or some other incentive. Sign your past clients up for the list. Let’s say you’re having a slow month and need to book – send out a newsletter with a special and you’ll be surprised how many bites you get.

So here’s part 1, Parts 2 and 3 coming over the next few days. Go on and get started making your website a better place!

Mistake #5 – Not updating your blog on a regular basis.

Because this is really your only way to generate search engine content, it’s imperative to keep the information flowing. Google loves new content and will visit your site more regularly if it sees that you’re updating it regularly. And, don’t just post a photo series. Talk a little about the shoot – the area you were in, the type of people you were photographing (newborn, family, children, etc). Describing these things will inject keywords without force into your blog posts in a way that’s legible…not a keyword sausage fest.

Mistake #6 – Not befriending content.

Content is your friend. It’s your buddy that gets you on the VIP list with google. Write good content for your blog posts. I know I just talked about this, but it’s so important that it gets it’s own Mistake too. Writing good content is the easiest thing you can do on your blog to climb the search engine ladder. Make sure any time that you write the following that they have descriptive, search engine friendly content:

Post titles

Post Content

Meta Titles

Slugs

Comments

Mistake #7 – Not utilizing linking opportunities.

Networking is such a great way to spread the love and help out your fellow photographers out there. Since most of you are operating in your area, a photographer in a far away city isn’t much competition for you. Create a blog roll and get mini banners from your recommended photo blogs. Do one per city, and make a deal with the photographers that you’re listing to list you as well. So, say you’re my photographer, I’m reading your blog and see a photographer that you love in Houston. I send that to my sister-in-law and she hires them. See how it works? Not to mention that your link on their site helps your search engine rankings and credibility, so to set up a symbiotic link swap via your blog roll will help both of you climb search engine rankings.

why this works

Google has a complex set of criteria for ranking your site against others with the same type of content and keywords. Part of this is what you do on your site to display good relevant content. The rest is what you’re doing off site – including how many links on the web are pointing at your website. These links are “graded” based on relevancy. So if your link were on my site, a web design site, that doesn’t weigh as much as a link on a photography site with similar keywords. The more links you have that are in your same genre, the more valuable that link becomes.

Mistake #8 – Posting randomly on each other’s blog posts.

Make the most out of any posts that you make on other’s blog posts. Posting randomly isn’t going to get you many clicks. If you can make what you say valuable and relevant, there’s a higher likelihood that someone will click your link there. Posting on each other’s blogs is a good thing for SEO though, it’s a relevant link to your website. If the blog that you’re posting on doesn’t have a good SEO setup though – this link isn’t going to help you out near as much as it might if they did.

Mistake #9 – Using a profile widget instead of an about page.

So, if climbing the SEO ranks is easily done by having great content, then passing on an entire page about you and what you do to opt for a mini section about you with just a couple of sentences is a tragedy. Your about page is a fantastic page for you to talk about you, what you do, and show a picture of yourself and your family. This page should be 500+ words. Include your name. The page title shouldn’t be About Me, it should be something like Staci Brillhart, San Diego photographer.

Mistake #10 – Not putting your contact information on your blog.

Think of your blog like a second website. It should have everything from an informational standpoint as your portfolio website and then some. Why not make it obvious how to get a hold of you? This way if someone lands on your blog and they have the impulse to call, they’ve got your number right there. While you’re at it, may as well have a contact page with an email form. Make it as easy for them to get in touch with you as possible – it’ll make it so easy that they’ll feel compelled to contact you.

Stay tuned, final installment coming soon!

Mistake #11 – Not making it easy to get back and forth between your blog and portfolio.

Make this simple! If not, you’re missing an opportunity to get your potential client to absorb every corner of your web existence. Also, you may lose people if they get to one site or the other and can’t get back where they were.

Mistake #12 – Not using sidebars.

Enable your sidebars for the following reasons:
*add your contact information
*your blog roll
*your blog categories

I know you don’t do this because you want to have gimongous pictures on your page, we’ll get to that in a minute.

You want this sidebar because it helps people find what they’re looking for, and it can help your SEO. Make categories for your posts that are search engine friendly. Say you like to shoot at a certain park, you could create a category for that park. Say I live in that area and love that park, if I google it you’re likely to show up as you have a category with this name in your blog. You can use tags the same way, just make sure that they’re accessible on every page via the sidebar.

Your blogroll we already discussed, but again I’ll say that it’s a great way for you to network and gives you an opportunity to swap a link with another blog.

Sticking this all at the bottom of the page isn’t going to be as effective as using a sidebar – no one is going to be looking at the bottom of the page, so no one is going to be using the functionality. Also, the further down the page the information is, the less relevant for google.

Mistake #13 – Ginormous photos.

I know that you really want to show big honkin pictures because, well, you’re a photographer and that’s your work! The bigger, the better – it’s easier to absorb that way. The problem is that it’s just too darn big. Your giant 27” mac monitor is way larger than the average user, so even though it looks awesome on your screen, most average users won’t be able to see an entire picture in one screen. This is a huge disservice to you, because if you think it’s bad to have your photos a little smaller – it’s way worse if they can’t even see the entire picture without scrolling.

20-30% of all users are on 1024×768 screens. That means that your pictures really shouldn’t be any taller than 600. When you factor in the space for the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and the url/toolbar at the top of the window, you don’t have much space left, so make it count.

Mistake #14 – Not using your blog’s SEO capabilities properly.

All in one SEO pack:

I’m assuming you’re already using this, but if you’re not – you can install it in your admin of your wordpress. Here are some tips to using it right:

In each post:

*Each blog post should have a unique meta title, specific to the subject matter of the post.
*Go ahead and give it a unique description. This isn’t going to help you out a ton, but could hurt you if you’re entering in duplicate content every time.
*You don’t have to enter in keywords. Google used keywords many many moons ago, but now they rely on content instead. Keywords don’t count. Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s a link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

In the settings:

Navigate to Settings > All in one SEO
*Make sure you’ve entered in a home title and description.
*Check canonical URL’s and rewrite titles. (this will make your url’s be search engine friendly)
*Leave the noindex options unchecked.
*Check Autogenerate Descriptions

Categories:

Make sure that all of your categories have a slug using hyphens to separate words that’s descriptive of what’s inside the category.

What not to do:
Category title: Fun parks
Category slug: fun-parks

What to do:
Category title: Fun Parks
Category slug: park-photography-san-diego

This will make the url for this category yourdomain.com/park-photography-san-diego which reads like keywords to google.

Hopefully you’ve discovered a few tips here that can help you optimize your blog. Make sure you have a stat counter installed on your blog (I love getclicky.com), and watch how making changes on your blog will start to effect your traffic results very quickly. Let us know how it works for you and if you need any help, don’t hesitate to ask.