PHOTOGRAPHy WEBSITES: SEO COOKBOOK

PhotoShelter Research April 2009

SPONSORED BY:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that helps your website who this is for rank higher in searches on Google and other major search engines. The We designed this document for photographers who are serious about better your ranking for specific keywords, the more likely that you are to extending their marketing strategies into the online realm using the drive traffic to your website, which leads to more potential new business. increasingly important concept of SEO.

In the past, photographers used outbound marketing techniques to get To produce this report, we spent months working with top SEO experts, to their audience: calling customers, sending postcards, or appearing in testing and refining our learning through PhotoShelter. We then person at events (e.g. portfolio visits or youth sports photography sales). consolidated all of our key SEO insights into a single reference written These “active” techniques are still important in an overall marketing specifically for photographers. The information is structured in a strategy, but the rise of the Internet has also created inbound marketing cookbook format, so it’s easy for you to identify specific action steps that opportunities. will help improve your SEO.

SEO is like jumping into the path of a prospective client exactly at the As we will reiterate throughout this document, you shouldn’t feel moment they’re looking for someone like you. A user searching for a compelled to change every aspect of your website at once. SEO is a wedding photographer (hypothetically) is a qualified lead, and having long-term play, and if you’ve installed Google Analytics, you’ll have an good SEO increases your likelihood of turning that lead as a client. empirical basis for determining how effective your efforts have been over various time periods. What SEO isn’t When people hear about SEO in passing, they tend to think that the how to use this guide goal of SEO is to make sure your website comes up first when you type In Section 2 and onward, look for the green “Do This” icon, which will in your name. This is incorrect. If people know your name, then most of give you steps on how to improve your SEO for specific factors that the marketing “heavy lifting” is already done. It’s more likely that a user we’ve deemed important. Using this guide doesn’t require PhotoShelter, is searching for a “Chicago Wedding Photographer,” and having your so it can be helpful to any photographer. However, PhotoShelter does website appear as a top search result for these probable search terms is support and automate many of these factors to make your life easier. what makes SEO so valuable.

SEO can generate more website traffic for free, which leads to greater sales.

The realities of SEO But before you throw your hands into the air in defeat, remember that Multiple studies have been conducted on how people interact with marketing is a game of numbers. Getting 1% of 10,000 people to click search results. It turns out that the majority of users never go past the first to your website just because you optimized properly on a few terms page, so the ultimate goal of your SEO activities is to get within the first could materially impact your revenues. And optimizing for what internet 10 search results for a given term. Using the same logic, therefore, it’s marketers call the “long tail” – providing precisely what a small segment probably not worth a tremendous amount of effort to move from page of customers is looking for – still produces tangible results. 100 to page 67. You can also see in the heat map that the paid ads on the right sidebar Below is a “heat map” that tracks the eye movement and clicks of users don’t get as much user attention or clicks as the natural search results. seeing the page for the first time. You’ll notice that the first three results So if you decide to buy text ads from Google, you should really use receive a disproportionate amount of attention, as well as the majority Google Analytics to determine if they are generating qualified traffic of the clicks. and leading to additional revenue.

The bottom line is that SEO works, and large companies spend lots of time and money to make sure that they come up first in search results, because they understand how this affects both brand perception and their bottom line. Although an individual photographer is playing in a smaller market than something like laptops, you can still use the same approach to optimize our marketing.

Please also bear in mind that the major search engines are constantly refining their algorithms, so make sure you have a good source of timely information about SEO. (See our Resources section)

google is search As of 2009, Google represents about 70% of all global search traffic, and on the photographers’ websites that we’ve studied, this figure is even higher. In that regard, Google is synonymous with “search engine,” and when we consider SEO, we are definitely trying to optimize primarily with Google in mind.

When SEO conflicts with other objectives This document is primarily focused on text-based SEO. However, as you Search engine algorithms are generalized. Nobody at Google is thinking will see, PhotoShelter employs many techniques that directly affect how that they should optimize their search for photo editors or a soccer images are coded in web pages – and our tactical recommendations mom. In that sense, SEO (i.e. factors that drive a user to a site) and user are designed to help improve your image search results as well. experience (i.e. the user’s perception when visiting a site) can sometimes be at odds. You need to carefully balance SEO tactics with a design that SEO is not rocket science. All the effective methodologies for improving suits your audience. SEO take time and planning, but ultimately they provide end users with a better search experience. Similarly, we suggest that you rename your files with descriptive text (e.g. “grand-canyon.jpg” instead of “DSC_0123.jpg”), but this can often developing a strategy conflict with Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategies. Given that file We suggest breaking down your SEO strategy into a few phases: name is probably not the most influential component in SEO, it probably makes sense to keep your DAM naming conventions if you’ve already 1. Setting Expectations spent time constructing it. Only you can determine how to balance 2. Planning these two areas if and when they come into conflict. 3. Tweaking On-Page Factors 4. Building Off-Page Factors Text SEO vs. Image SEO 5. Things to Avoid The sizable majority of search volume is from the Google homepage or 6. Benchmarking & Analytics Toolbar, and these searches yield text-based results. However, Google now provides “Universal Search” results which mixes top returns for Web It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of areas that encompass Search, Image Search, News Search, and Blog Search, often on page an SEO strategy. Rather than trying to solve all the issues simultaneously, one. Many photographers are simultaneously seeking to optimize their we like a measured approach. Fix your page titles in week 1, your gallery site for Google Image Search and text search. descriptions in week 2, etc. Since the full effect of your SEO efforts won’t take hold for a few months, you might as well pace yourself. Two different (although overlapping) groups are responsible for these two types of search (general vs. image-specific). While, overall, not nearly as much SEO conversation is dedicated to Google Image Search, considering it’s a niche, it is true that the same general guiding factors influence both types of search.

Phase 1: Setting ExpectationS Phase 2: Planning You should accept upfront the frustrating fact that there is no It’s impossible to optimize for every keyword. There isn’t enough time guaranteed, clear-cut way to claim the #1 spot. For starters, the search in the day, and there is too much competition for specific terms engines like to keep their algorithms mysterious. These are trade secrets (You’ll never appear on page 1 for “photographer,” but you might for that keep them ahead of competition and prevent marketers from “Hawaiian Sea Life Photographer”). The planning phase requires you to gaming the system. And, search engines are getting smarter daily – think about what keywords and concepts you want associated with your meaning techniques could be outdated the minute you perfect them! website.. So prepare yourself – be patient and relish even the smallest victories. It doesn’t pay to be a generalist. And if you shoot stock photography but Further, your search engine rankings don’t change overnight. In fact, also shoot weddings, you might consider creating multiple sites. Not only most of the major search engines have mechanisms to ensure that is this better from a user experience perspective (i.e. your stock photo a newly optimized site doesn’t spring to the top of the results quickly buyers have no interest in your wedding photos and vice versa), but it because those situations are likely fraudulent. makes it easier for you to focus your copy on key terms.

Most experts agree that SEO changes take a minimum of 3 months to Describe your business in 150 characters or less really take effect. That said, if you’ve never thought about SEO, then EXAMPLE 1: employing some strategies might have a quick effect on your rankings. DO THIS Juan Fernandez is a wedding photographer in Chicago who We’ve seen people move from page 10 to page 6 quickly. But as you shoots in a photojournalistic style and covers the Chicago metro might expect, getting to the first page of search results for a given area. Se habla espanol. keyword gets exponentially harder. And the activities that you need to do to move up to the first page (e.g. building inbound links from other EXAMPLE 2: sites) take a lot more effort than adding a few keywords to your pages. Brad Mangin is a freelance sports photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He regularly shoots for Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball But unlike marketing in the pre-Internet era, an individual photographer Photos. can now use free analytical tools to understand how to systematically address the marketing challenge presented by SEO. So set aside a few The 150-character suggestion fits with the amount of text that Google days to think about planning, and then a few months to really employ lists in any search entry. How you describe your business in this section will the SEO techniques that work. SEO is definitely a trial-and-error process, affect whether people click on your link or not, and the keywords that particularly as the search algorithms get refined. you use to describe your business will affect your SEO. We’ll discuss where to put this description later.

Here are the results for “Chicago wedding photographer”: Brainstorm keywords and phrases that you think people would use to find a service such as yours DO THIS EXAMPLE: Chicago wedding photographer, wedding photojournalism, Spanish wedding photographer, affordable wedding photography

You should start with a minimum of 50 keywords/phrases because many of the terms might have too much competition to truly optimize for, as we’ll see in the next step. Your list can be as long as you want, but there’s no point generating a list that is too long for you to manage.

Use Google’s free AdWords Keyword Tool to: • Check the search volume on your various keywords. DO THIS • Check the competition for the given keywords. • “Chicago wedding photographer” gets more monthly searches • Rank your list of terms to understand how you’ll spend your than “Chicago wedding photographers” time. • “Wedding photographer in Chicago” has 1/25th the search volume of “Chicago wedding photographer” The Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives the estimated number of • The advertiser competition for “Chicago wedding photographer” is searches flowing through Google for a given keyword. While originally relatively high, but this is only a measure of people paying for ads intended for Google paid advertising, the intelligence is great to use for your own SEO too. This is important because: We can use other tools to gauge general keyword difficulty. We like a tool offered by www.seologs.com, which rates the difficulty of getting • Keywords that you deem important might not have sufficient search ranked in the top 10 listings for any search term. According to this tool, volume to justify optimizing for “Chicago wedding photographer” has a difficulty of 60/100. So it’s • There might be variants of a given keyword that have better search probably possible to optimize for this particular search with solid strategy volume and make better targets and effort over several months. Depending on your specialty, you’ll • You need to determine whether competition for a given term is too need to test keyword targets that deliver lower search volume yet lower high to realistically optimize for difficulty, vs. others with higher volume and higher difficulty – and see where you get the most traction over time.

You should now have a refined list of terms with a relative priority ranking. Every major search engine (Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc) has a secret set of There’s no magic to this list. It’s your reference to understand what terms rules that govern how websites come up in searches. Most experts are important to you and how difficult it will be to succeed in optimizing separate the key factors into a few areas: for them. Your list should be significantly larger:

Term Relevance Difficulty Searches/month Usage data photographer low high 2,740,000 chicago wedding high medium 3,600 photographer Inbound links Trust & authority naperville wedding high easy 91 of domain photographer wedding photogra- high easy 590 phers in chicago

On-page data We now have a starting point for our overall keyword strategy. The sample terms above represent a wide brush; your circumstances or individual pages within your website may require more specific terms (e.g. images from a wedding in Old St. Patrick’s Church, or vintage Cadillac Eldorado stock photos). Note that off-page factors are the largest driver of rankings.

The list can help remind you of the central focus of your keyword • Off-page factors (75% of weight) strategy, and it can direct all of your online marketing-related copy, • Trust and authority of the domain whether you’re writing a blog, a forum post, etc. In short, spend time • Inbound links creating a good list, and update it occasionally. • Usage data • On-page factors (25%)

The following cookbook sections recommend tactics to impact both types of factors – beginning with on-page.

On-page factors Flash On-page factors are items that you can fixtoday to improve your SEO, Adobe Flash is a technology used by many websites because of because they only involve changes to your own website. However, its support for attractive user interface elements (e.g. crossfading since on-page factors only account for about 25% of the overall search transitions, elegant drop-down menus, etc). However, Flash cannot be ratings, you cannot assume that fixing your on-page factors alone will reliably indexed by the major search engines. The best Flash website yield improved results. software programs and vendors build HTML mirror sites to allow search engines to see the contents of a website, but most do not. PhotoShelter has many tools to help you with on-page SEO, but our approach to SEO is generic and can be used by photographers on stand-alone websites as well. We’ve ordered the following list based on FF Consider avoiding Flash altogether. importance to your photography website SEO. The structure for the list DO THIS FF If you must use Flash, make sure that there is an HTML mirror was derived, in part, from SEOMoz’s fantastic blog entry entitled “Google site. Search Engine Ranking Factors.”

• Assume that a manufacturer’s claims are accurate regarding

NOT THIS SEO support in Flash. If an entire site is built from Flash without an HTML mirror site, Google simply can’t see it. There is no version of Flash today that Google can accurately index for SEO, and links within the site cannot be followed by Google’s crawlers.

Page Titles Page titles are the descriptive text at the top of your web browser window, and are considered the most important on-page factor. Bad: Allen Murabayashi Photography Good: Editorial & Portrait Photography in New York | Allen Murabayashi

You or your designer can control the page title text. Page titles don’t FF Put your most important keywords first. Google gives priority have to be grammatically correct. However, the title appears as the to the order of words in the title. DO THIS clickable header in search results, so it should be understandable FF Use your keyword list to inform your page titles. and should make a user want to click on your website. PhotoShelter’s FF Create unique page titles for every page in your website. homepage page title is “Photo hosting. Sell photos. Photography websites.”

• Put your name at the front of the page title.

NOT THIS • Use the same title on every page of your site. This can negatively affect your SEO.

. • Automatically set your page titles using data like gallery names

WE HELP to generate unique titles. • Automatically append your site name at the end of the title. • Automatically append “ – Images” to the names of your galleries. • Allow you to override the page titles on specific pages so that you can keyword optimize. Most experts are ambivalent about including your name in the page title, particularly at the beginning. Instead, if you include your name (or site name) they recommend appending it to the end. Page titles are suggested to be 70 characters or less.

BEFORE: Keyword Use in Body Text The LIve Well Company’s The judicious use of keywords in the body text of your web pages website had a minimalist homepage with no text. helps reinforce the words and phrases that are most important to your business. Avoid exclusively using colloquial phrases like “shot” instead of “photograph” or “image” because users are much more likely to search on the latter.

FF Include a description of your services on your homepage. F DO THIS F Include a description of each gallery that you publish. FF Include captions for each photo that you publish.

• Take a minimalist approach to the inclusion of copy on your

NOT THIS site. The attitude of “letting my photos speak for themselves” has no bearing in an SEO strategy. It might be pretty, but it AFTER: The inclusion of text which won’t generate any new leads. matched their keyword target list pushed them from page 11 to page 1 in a few weeks for “personal • Allow you to type in descriptive text on your homepage. trainer tribeca” searches.

WE HELP • Allow you to include gallery descriptions and image captions. • Allow you to configure an optional “About Me” page for further keyword optimization.

Keyword Use in the H1 Tag HTML is a scripting language that makes web pages work. HTML includes tags called the “header” tags with various priority (e.g.

,

, etc). Using

...

to surround the most important keywords on the page helps the search engines identify the most significant text on the page.

FF Make sure that you or your webmaster understands the

DO THIS importance of the H1 tag, and only uses it once per page.

• Think that the

or other header tags is weighted equally
NOT THIS by the search engines as the

tag. • Try to stuff all your text into the

tag. Google is smarter than you think.
• Automatically insert gallery names in the

WE HELP
Your web browser turns HTML code into the web pages that you can see. Your web programmer can use specific tags to increase the importance of items on the page to search engines. On this particular page, PhotoShelter puts the gallery name within the

tags.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 11 how search engines determine your ranking | part 1: on-page factors
Keyword use in the URL Human-readable URLs are very common in the blogosphere, but less common in photographer websites. Very rarely will you see a URL like http://joephoto.com/gallery/Grand-Canyon-Photos. But Google likes Fig 1. Amazon.com uses human-readable URLs for every one of their products for SEO purposes. these human-readable URLs because they can give a user a clue as to what the link is, and they help reinforce important keywords.
Fig 2. Most blogging software also incorporates part of the blog title into the URL. FF Make sure any website templates that you are using support keywords in the URLs. DO THIS
• Use a Flash-based website that doesn’t generate unique Fig 3. PhotoShelter uses information like gallery names to create readable URLs page URLs. Unfortunately, Flash-based websites that support NOT THIS keywords in the URL are rare.
• Automatically set up keyworded URLs for each of your galleries
WE HELP based on the gallery name.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 12 how search engines determine your ranking | part 1: on-page factors
description in “ALT” tags The HTML code for inserting an image has an ALT (alternate) attribute that allows the photographer to describe the image since computers can’t tell what is in a photo. For example:
BAD: GOOD:
FF Make sure that you caption your images. FF Make sure that your website software extracts captions and DO THIS inserts them into the ALT tag (or gives you a way to manually populate the ALT tag).
• Use the same caption for every image from the same set of
NOT THIS images.
• Automatically inserts your IPTC Description into the ALT tag for both thumbnails and larger images. You can add or edit WE HELP PhotoShelter populates the image ALT tag with your IPTC Description, which allows Google to “understand” IPTC descriptions in PhotoShelter or in common software like the contents of an image. Photoshop, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, or Aperture.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 13 how search engines determine your ranking | part 1: on-page factors
meta description tag Meta tags are bits of HTML code that are invisible to users but viewable FF Make sure your website software allows you to fill out the by search engines. The meta description tag gives you a way to DO THIS meta description on every page. describe a web page apart from what’s viewable on the page. And it’s FF Make sure your meta descriptions are not identical to what’s this meta description that appears under the page title in search results. actually readable on the page. Most experts suggest meta descriptions of no more than 150 characters FF Use your keyword list to inform your description. because that’s about what Google displays in a search result. Recall the FF Use full sentences, not a list of keywords, to accurately description we wrote way back in the planning phase? Here’s where describe what a viewer can expect from this page. you’ll want to use it after cross-referencing your target keywords: • Use the same meta description on every page.
NOT THIS • Include your keywords in list form, separated by commas.
• Allow you to insert custom meta descriptions on key pages. • Automatically insert gallery descriptions into gallery pages. WE HELP
The tag in HTML can be used to provide a page description which is read by Google. That description populates the text you see below the page title in a search result.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 14 how search engines determine your ranking | part 1: on-page factors
meta keyword tag In addition to description tags, you can insert specific keyword tags into FF Make sure your website software supports the meta keyword your page level metadata. These tags apply to the web page itself, DO THIS field. not the meta data on specific images. Most SEO experts agree that the FF Enter keywords that describe each and every image meta keyword field isn’t given much weight, because historically is has into the IPTC Keyword field in your photo software (e.g. been abused by those engaging in “keyword spamming.” Nevertheless, Photoshop, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, Aperture) if your some believe that it may have an incremental benefit. Since keywords website software can extract this information for the meta are helpful in finding your images on your own site, it makes sense to keyword field. integrate those image keywords into the meta keyword field. • Don’t assume that all search engines are the same. The
NOT THIS major search engines don’t support “stemming” and plurals, The same IPTC Keywords that while specialized sites like PhotoShelter do. It’s better to add you use to describe your images to visitors to your website can be grammatical variations to ensure maximum portability. used to populate the • Fill up your keyword tags with irrelevant terms. Google keywords field in the HTML code for search engines. considers this keyword spam. If site visitors navigate away quickly, Google will penalize you in search rankings.
• Automatically add your IPTC keywords into the meta keyword
WE HELP fields of your website. .
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 15 how search engines determine your ranking | part 1: on-page factors
Keywords on the visible page Keywords, especially conceptual ones, are helpful to search engines and humans alike. For a text search, on-page keyword lists may not have a highly material impact to search rankings (again because of the potential for “keyword spamming”). However, it is factored in. For a Google Image search, on the other hand, on-page keywords provide important descriptive text surrounding the image.
Although adding keywords and captions are the bane of photographers, we strongly suggest the inclusion of this information on the page.
Recent comments by Google indicate that, as search engines evolve, they will continue to look deeper at images’ metadata. With this in mind, adding keywords and captions to your images’ IPTC fields may also give you a head start on the next generation of SEO.
FF Take the time to add keywords into your images.
DO THIS FF Make sure this information is also displayed on your webpages.
• Automatically extract your keyword metadata from your
WE HELP images and display them as text on your PhotoShelter pages. (You can choose not to display keywords too.)
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 16 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
Off-page factors Off-page factors carry about 65-75% of the search engine ranking weight, and for good reason. Inbound link traffic is hard to build, Usage and indicates to Google your relevance, credibility, and popularity data associated with a given search term. For example, if you design spaceships and NASA links to your website, then you’re probably a pretty Inbound links good rocket scientist. If 1,000 other credible websites link to your website, Trust & authority chances are that you are an expert, and should be justly rewarded of domain with a good search ranking for “rocket scientist.” If only your mom links to your website, that tells Google you’re not necessarily well-known or providing valuable information, and potentially not a good website to send Google users. On-page data
Off-page factors take more time and effort to build – when you think about it, they really represent building legitimacy. After all, anyone can build a web page, but how many web pages are interesting or important enough to cause other people to link to them?
Once the basic mechanics of your website are built with the previously described on-page factors, you need to work on consistently building the off-page factors to increase your SEO. Persistence pays.
The factors on the following pages should be a part of your off-page strategy.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 17 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
Global Link Popularity Compare the following: The number of unique links from different domains that point to your • apple.com: 122,000,000 links website significantly influences your SEO because it’s a sign of true • anseladams.com: 320,000 links credibility and it’s hard to do. The number of links influences your Google • onelouderphoto.com: 328 links Page Rank, which operates on a logarithmic scale from 1-10, where 10 is the best. You can install the Google Toolbar to see your Page Rank. It isn’t unusual for a photographer to only have inbound links in the You can also track the number of sites that link to you by typing in the tens to the hundreds before they create a more comprehensive linking following to Google: strategy. links:[your domain name] FF Use Google to determine how many sites link to you.
DO THIS FF Create a reasonable goal to consistently build inbound links. For example: FF Use the public profile pages provided by trade organization websites (e.g APA) and professional forums (e.g. SportsShooter.com) to link back to your site. FF Figure out how influential media and/or bloggers can write about your photography. FF Consider grouping with like-minded photographers to link to one another. FF Contribute your own articles at recognized trade media and blogs. (We’re always looking to share photographers’ success stories on the PhotoShelter blog, so drop us a line!) FF Quality matters. A link from an authoritative site is more impactful than an untrafficked/unknown website.
Note: do not add a space between the colon and your domain name. • Pay for links. Google can tell when links are manufactured
25,300 links from other websites connect to PhotoShelter. PhotoShelter is NOT THIS through a “link farm” and looks negatively at this. a service for independent photographers, and many of our customers blog about the service, or link to the service from their web pages – so it’s not surprising that our number of links is much greater than an individual photographer’s.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 18 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
WHO DOES inbound linking WELL? Age of Site Brad Mangin ranks first for “sports photographer.” He: The longer a domain has been registered, the more likely that it isn’t a • Built profile on SportsShooter.com scam or fly-by-night operation to generate traffic. So it’s important to • Built profile on ASMP register a domain as quickly as possible. Also, some SEO experts logically • Built profile on NPPA surmise that Google can tell if a single individual/organization has • Built profile on AltPick.com (a sourcebook for photographers) registered a bunch of domains and is creating circular links (because • Built profile from Eddie Adams Workshop site registration information is public). It doesn’t pay to try to game the • Built profile on List Photographers.com search engines, so don’t use this as a covert method. • Has a Wikipedia entry • Images listed at Getty Images • Images listed at Sports Illustrated image collection • Built profile on Facebook • Built profile on LinkedIn • Built profile on Lightstalkers • Authored stories on websites like SportsShooter.com • Profiled on Apple.com (huge bonus points) • Profiled on Imaging Info • Written about on PDN Pulse • Profiled on various end-user blogs • Profiled on ThinkTank Photo website
Brad also has a liveBooks Flash-based website with an HTML mirror site, integrated with his PhotoShelter archive, where thousands of images are captioned, keyworded, and priced for rights managed stock photo FF Register your own domain as soon as possible. licensing. So, all of this content is well indexed by Google. DO THIS FF Renew it for multiple years at a time.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 19 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
Topical Relevance of Inbound Links Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community Getting links from a related site helps to prove the credibility of your Not only do you want links from other photo websites, but you want links links. Bad marketers have tried to buy links from “link farms,” but if an from the top websites in the space. For example, Brad Mangin has a link unrelated website links to you multiple times, the search engines can tell from the Professional Photographers area of Apple.com. This is much that you’re gaming and penalize you. more significant than a link from an unknown photographer website.
FF Try to build link traffic from photo-related or arts-related FF Try to have the best websites in the industry/market link to
DO THIS websites. DO THIS you where possible (and relevant). FF Try to build link traffic from complementary service providers FF Consider entering photo contests or achieving special in your industry (e.g. a wedding photographer might seek recognition from popular sites (e.g. Magnum Expression links from caterers, florists, dressmakers, stationery vendors). Photo Contest or PDN 30). FF Consider creating an entry in a service like the Yahoo! Directory. This paid listing is one of the few ways to buy legitimate links from an important website.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 20 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
Rate of New Inbound Links Usage Metrics If you add 3 new inbound links to your website per month, you will Services like Google Analytics allow photographers to see how their build 30 links in ten months. But if you added 2 in the first month, 4 in visitors are interacting with their website. How long did they stay? How the second month, 8 in the third month, you’ll have exponentially more many pages did they look at? How many people directly navigated to inbound links – proof of your site’s popularity within a fixed period of time. the page because they bookmarked it? All of these usage metrics are Building this type of traffic is difficult, but that’s where the virality of the probably factored into search engine rankings as indicators of content Internet can come into play. quality.
Sites like DIGG, which aggregate user-suggested and voted content, can quickly build massive amounts of traffic in a short period. FF Try to generate traffic from visitors who are interested in your
DO THIS content. FF Use Google Analytics to understand which keywords are FF Continuously create new galleries of interesting subject best performers in driving search traffic to your website.
DO THIS matter because of the potential to go viral. FF If you have e-commerce on your website, use Google FF Consider how your blog could cover topics that could be Analytics to understand keyword conversion rate – which reblogged. keywords perform best at attracting visitors that become paying customers. WHO DOES IT WELL: • A PhotoShelter blog interview of photographer Bill Henson • Consider text ads as a cornerstone of your search strategy.
coincidentally went live around the time that he was accused NOT THIS Although ads can work, often times they generate poorly of child pornography in Australia. The piece was picked up by qualified traffic. Plus, they can be expensive! Digg, and generated over 100,000 unique page views in a few • Generate traffic for traffic’s sake. Poorly qualified visitors can days. cost a lot of money and actually hurt your SEO – We strongly • Vincent Laforet’s video “Reverie” was the first publicly recommend you do not purchase ads to generate unqualified disseminated video created with the Canon 5d Mark II. traffic, use inaccurate keywords,or participate in link farms.
• Add Google Analytics to your PhotoShelter website pages
WE HELP
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 21 how search engines determine your ranking | part 2: off-page factors | domain attributes
Create and Register a Sitemap A sitemap is like a table of contents to search engines. Google has a tool called Google Webmaster, which allows you to register a sitemap which acts like a “hints” file of what exists on the site and its importance.
FF Use website software that allows you to create and register
DO THIS a sitemap. FF Register your sitemap with Google Webmaster.
• Creates a sitemap of your galleries in your website
WE HELP customization directory which you can register with Google Webmaster. For example: http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/ keithbedford/sitemap.xml
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 22 how search engines determine your ranking | part 3: off-page factors | LINK attributes
Anchor Text of Inbound Links Age of Link HTML allows a user to specify which text is a link. The best SEO links use The longer that a link exists, the more credible it’s believed to be. Or at keywords as the link text rather than generic phrases. For example: the very least, a link has to be about 3 months old before Google will really consider it in rankings. This prevents unscrupulous marketers from BAD: trying to build tons of links overnight. This is a gallery of my photos of the Empire State Building Cameron Davidson is a great photographer who shoots aerial photos FF Be patient when you build links.
GOOD: DO THIS FF Build links regularly so that you don’t have an erratic history This is a gallery of my photos of the Empire State Building of link creation. Cameron Davidson is a great photographer who shoots aerial photos
FF Consider maintaining a blog so that you can build inbound
DO THIS links to your core photography website with your keyword hit list in mind. FF Encourage others to use descriptive text to link to you.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 23 how search engines determine your ranking | part 3: off-page factors | LINK attributes
Text Surrounding the Link The contextual copy around a link is thought to be an increasingly important factor in SEO – particularly as we move closer to notions of the “semantic web.” Therefore, repetitive links in something like a footer (which might always be surrounded by a copyright notice and a phone number) are weighted less importantly than links surrounded by more descriptive text.
FF Take time to write accurate descriptions of your galleries
DO THIS and images surrounding your links. For example: “View my gallery of 2009 women’s couture swimwear fashion photography. This gallery includes bikinis by Badgley Mischka, modeled by Jennifer Smith on Ka‘anapali Beach in Maui, Hawaii.”
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 24 9 things to avoid
As we’ve referenced throughout this guide, search engines are smart. 5. Crappy links to known spam sites. Keep good company: If you’re What they can give, they can also take away. They aim to provide the associated with sites that only exist to trick the search engines, your best possible searches for customers. If you engage in activities that site may be viewed negatively too. indicate you are fraudulent or trying to garner undue rankings, they will 6. Duplicate titles and meta descriptions on many pages. Diversity penalize you heavily. You may never be able to claw your way back is rewarded, and duplication can be penalized. to decent listings without a total identity change. With that prospect 7. Buying links. Don’t do it. Build your links organically, because it leads in mind, here’s our consolidated advice for what not to do in order to to better results for users as well as for you. avoid being blacklisted. 8. Driving irrelevant traffic. Buying irrelevant ads or using other methods to drive traffic at all costs will come back to bite you – it’s 1. Overuse of keywords. This might seem to lie in opposition to not only costly, but it increases your bounce rate. everything we’ve already said. But this is about moderation. Every 9. Giving up. SEO is a very worthwhile and attainable goal. And keyword on your hit list need not, and should not, appear on every although it takes some foresight and planning, it doesn’t require a page in your website. Think about this contextually. How can every computer science degree. If you can understand f-stops and shutter page equally represent your entire list without it being keyword speeds, you certainly can master SEO. spam? 2. Excessive website downtime. If your website is offline when the search engines try to index it, they might think it no longer exists. An hour or two of downtime for maintenance per month is the maximum. 3. Misuse of keywords. This one is about accuracy – be very disciplined in your keywording in page copy, web page metadata, and in your image meta data. For each keyword you use, think about your site visitor’s experience. If the visitor would not likely stay or click another link on your site – then you’ve just potentially hurt your SEO (by increasing your bounce rate). 4. Duplicate content. The people who program the search engines are smart. Replicating the same galleries in an effort to game the system will negatively affect your SEO.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 25 BENCHMARKING AND ANALYTICS
Before you start you may want to put some benchmarks in place to Traffic Volume measure your campaign’s effectiveness. Options here can be simple – If your SEO strategy is working, you should see an increase in visitors to like doing searches to see where you rank today vs. after you apply our your site. (Of course, other factors could change from month to month tactics. Or, they can be more elaborate, employing Google Analytics to that make it difficult to attribute traffic patterns directly to your SEO gauge your progress more analytically. efforts.)
Search Results Benchmarks Your ‘benchmark’ is simply your starting point – your current state. You should establish your benchmarks before making any SEO changes. You can easily use your target keyword list to track your initial benchmark and subsequent progress over the following weeks and months. Perform searches and note where you appear in the results (page #, and listing # Traffic Sources on page). Make sure you’ve disabled one of Google’s newest features, Google Analytics gives you a pie chart in your ‘Traffic Sources Overview’ “Search by Web History,” which alters search results based on your prior report that shows your unique visits from search engines vs. people directly behavior. typing your URL vs. links from other sites (‘referrals’). If your SEO strategy is working, your absolute number of visitors coming from search engines, Google Analytics Benchmarks and probably your % of traffic from search engines, should go up. Although a detailed explanation of Google Analytics is beyond the scope of this guide, here are some basic stats you can track to get a sense of how your search rankings are impacting the volume and quality of your site traffic:
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 26 how search engines determine your ranking | part 4: benchmarking & analytics
Bounce Rate Measuring your progress Google defines a ‘bounce’ as a visitor who looks at the first page of your We recommend measuring your progress on a regular basis – once a site and does not click to any other pages (i.e., exiting after seeing that month or once a quarter. You may also want to note on your tracking one page and presumably deciding your site’s content does not match sheets which changes you’ve made to SEO factors and when, so you their search interests.) Your bounce rate for search traffic should go down can associate results with efforts and adjust your tactics accordingly. if your search terms are effectively driving relevant traffic. In terms of targeting an optimal bounce rate, Google Analytics specialist Avinash SO, HOW AM I DOING? Kaushik has stated: “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, There aren’t any hard rules for empirically judging how well you are anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.” But it doing. Obviously, if you have found your way to the first page of results is also widely quoted that an average bounce rate across all websites for your target terms, you are excelling! is 40%, and from our experience with a lot of photographer websites, anything under 50% or so and you are probably doing ok. In absence of a hard science that applies to all circumstances, we’d encourage you just to keep track of your benchmarks and make sure your key stats are moving in the right direction over time. Is your traffic going up overall? Is your search traffic going up? Is your bounce rate going down? Are your visits from your target keywords going up? If so – Keywords then you’re doing well – keep going. Having open discussions with other Look at your ‘Traffic Sources – Keywords’ report. This shows the top photographers will certainly help you gauge your progress too. keywords visitors are searching on to reach your site. For each keyword, the report shows the number of visits resulting from each, and other WE can HELP you relevant stats like bounce rate and time spent on site. If your SEO PhotoShelter’s SEO Grader is a tool that’s built into all PhotoShelter strategy is working, you should get more visits every month for your target accounts. It will scan your website as often as you’d like. The tool scores keywords. you on completeness for over 30 different on-page SEO factors within your control, and provides specific action steps on how to improve. You can create a chart to track these Google Analytics benchmarks as well, or use the date range capabilities to make sure that your metrics Of course, the ultimate indicator of success is new revenue. Strategies for are improving. Download the tracking spreadsheet template that we driving conversion - getting people to become paying customers once use internally, provided with the SEO Toolkit. they visit your site - is another important topic, for another time! For now, we hope this guide has helped you create a strategy for driving qualified leads to your site in volumes that are significant to your business.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 27 resources
should i use a consultant? Take advantage of some these additional PhotoShelter resources: There is so much that you can do to improve your SEO by yourself that we generally do not recommend using a consultant as your first step. • PhotoShelter Webinars cover everything from “how to” tutorials to If you’re not currently using PhotoShelter, you should make sure your more advanced topics like Google Analytics for Photographers. web designer is familiar with SEO concepts because you can no longer • The PhotoShelter blog – A Picture’s Worth - publishes timely information “design” websites without considering the visibility to search engines. on business and marketing for photographers. We write about SEO There are many consultants who will charge an arm and a leg for the regularly and continue to share everything as we learn it. most basic of information – and almost all of their suggestions will be redundant with the information we’ve presented here. TELL US YOUR STORY Because SEO is such a trial-and-error process, we are strong believers online resources in sharing experiences with each other about what works and doesn’t There are thousands of online resources, but here are some of our work. Do you have any stories about your efforts to improve your SEO? favorites: We’d love to hear them and may even publish them to our blog (which will in turn help your SEO with a high traffic linkback!). • HubSpot’s Website Grader • SEOMoz E-mai [email protected] • SEOlogs.com • Distilled IF YOU LIKED IT, SHARE IT! • Hobo-web We really enjoy providing this information to the photography • Web Distortion community at no cost. If you’ve found it helpful, please link to our main SEO page from your website or blog. (By now you know just how PHOTOSHELTER RESOURCES important a link from you is!) Here’s the URL: If you don’t have time or resources to directly address the suggestions in this guide via your own website, consider a PhotoShelter account. http://pa.photoshelter.com/mkt/seo Archiving and displaying your images with PhotoShelter will help your SEO, whether or not you decide to use our website templates as your core photography website. We have loaded powerful SEO capabilities into all of our accounts, and our ‘SEO Grader’ assesses your current SEO status and gives you an action plan to improve it.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 28 how can we help?
PhotoShelter is the leader in online portfolio display and sales tools for photographers. SPECIAL OFFER:
With PhotoShelter, you also get powerful features SAVE $30! and resources to boost your own SEO. Visit Join PhotoShelter by May 30, 2009 and get $30 off photoshelter.com/tour our regular pricing with an Annual Standard Account. Let PhotoShelter power Get seen & sell your work with access to all of your business online! PhotoShelter’s pro-strength features. Only $299/year!
Visit photoshelter.com/signup and enter coupon code ps3CCRGWHF.*
Start writing your photography success story today.
*Offer valid only for new paid PhotoShelter users with coupon code provided at checkout.
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 29 www.adorama.com • 800-223-2500
Adorama is dedicated to helping you take your photography - and your photography business - to the next level. That’s why we’re sponsoring this important guide. We provide a total interactive educational resource with extensive free articles, photo tips, and the latest camera gear reports, and a soon to be launched blog, ‘TechTock’ at ALC – Adorama Learning Center. At the Workshops@Adorama we present a comprehensive live educational program in The Adorama Building, our New York City headquarters. And for photographers interested in online interactive classes, Adorama has partnered with PPSOP, The Perfect Picture School of Photography.
For all your photographic needs and latest specials please contact:
Jeffrey Snyder Ray Garcia Pro Market Sales Pro Market Sales Adorama Camera Adorama Camera email: [email protected] email: [email protected] 800-223-2500 ext 2435 800-223-2500 ext 2245
© 2009 PhotoShelter, Inc. • Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK • 30

,

,

, etc). Using

...

or other header tags is weighted equally NOT THIS by the search engines as the

tag. • Try to stuff all your text into the

tag. Google is smarter than you think.• Automatically insert gallery names in the

WE HELPYour web browser turns HTML code into the web pages that you can see. Your web programmer can use specific tags to increase the importance of items on the page to search engines. On this particular page, PhotoShelter puts the gallery name within the

or other header tags is weighted equally
NOT THIS by the search engines as the

tag. Google is smarter than you think.
• Automatically insert gallery names in the

WE HELP
Your web browser turns HTML code into the web pages that you can see. Your web programmer can use specific tags to increase the importance of items on the page to search engines. On this particular page, PhotoShelter puts the gallery name within the