Complete SEO Training for Photographers

FOREGROUNDWEB

Complete SEO training for photographers

ALL MY SEO-RELATED CONTENT IN ONE SINGLE PDF: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MAKING GOOGLE HAPPY

CONTENTS:

2 The complete SEO guide for photographers: 50 tips to maximize your Google rankings & get found online

63 One single SEO tip to rule them all

66 A simpler approach to writing your SEO titles and meta-descriptions

72 Image SEO essentials: How to optimize for Google Image search to drive more traffic to your photography website

92 The photographer’s mini-guide to backlinks: how to create, gain & track links back to your site

97 SEO is no longer a game you can “win” with tags & keywords

99 20 quick tips to reduce your bounce rate & keep visitors on your site longer

104 ForegroundWeb Q&As FOREGROUNDWEB

The complete SEO guide for photographers

50 TIPS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR GOOGLE RANKINGS AND GET FOUND ONLINE

This is not a shallow list of Google’s ranking factors; that would have been too vague. I wanted to instead gather all photography SEO ideas and turn them into straightforward actions to improve your site in Google’s eyes.

Prepare to take some time to go through this entire list and put in the hard work, all toward a photo website that both users and Google will love!

This article covers 50 (yes, fifty) SEO actions to go through: • on-site & off-site SEO factors • getting backlinks • website performance & mobile-friendliness • image optimization best practices • free SEO tools • examples & graphics • links to other relevant articles & resources Some of the actions are gathered from my 60+ Photography Website Mistakes guide while others are the result of tens of hours of extensive research. You will be learning SEO basics and more advanced tactics, how to avoid common SEO mistakes, how to increase conversion rates & promote your photography site online.

Many of the actions below assume you also have a blog. From an SEO point of view, a blog certainly offers a lot more content for search engines to “digest”, it can help you rank higher in search results for certain keywords.

First of all, in order to harness all the ideas in this article, you should at least have a vague understanding of SEO and get acquainted with Google’s list of ranking factors. Here are some fantastic resources to get you started: • The aptly-titled “What the heck is SEO & why should I care?” • MOZ’s excellent “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” • Google’s own interactive “How Search Works”

It would have been pointless to try to repeat these great pieces of content, or just put out a list of Google’s ranking factors. I wanted instead to extract all the photography-relevant ideas and turn them into clear actions you can take to improve your photo website in Google’s eyes.

If you’re overwhelmed by all of this and would rather hire an expert to handle all the SEO work for your photography website, check out my complete SEO review service for photographers. I’ll give you all the help and clarity you need to rank higher in Google.

Given this great diversity of ideas, I’ve tried to estimate their importance, as well as difficulty and time to implement. I’ve also tried sequencing them in a logical order, to make it easier for you to progress through them as you build or improve your website.

One of the mantras here at ForegroundWeb is to always start with WHY? Intro: Why is SEO important for your photography business

Photographers are very creative by nature, so SEO understandably falls under the gloomy area of “technical stuff”. But the fog is starting to lift.

The SEO industry has definitely matured over the last few years, and Google’s algorithms are becoming easier to understand. It’s true that many SEO aspects require some technical experience, but the SEO grand-scheme-of-things is becoming simpler.

By many estimates, there are over 200 signals that affect SEO rankings (though this is likely an exaggeration). Many of them fall into the “on-site” category (page titles, header tags, on-page copy etc.) – things that you can control.

The SEO community estimates that 60-80% of all click traffic goes to the first three search results. Not only that, but if users are not satisfied with the results, they’re more likely to refine their search than to go page 2 (once again, quality beats quantity). In fact, 75% of users never view the second page of search results. So ranking well for relevant keywords leads to more visitors to your site, and, therefore, more sales or clients.

Not only that, but it’s one of the most cost-effective and future-proof investments you can make. If you’re not hiring an SEO company to do the work for you, and you’re handling your site’s SEO on your own, your only expense is time (unlike investing money in advertising).

And all your competitors are doing it. You can’t ignore the online market changes and just hope that your photography is good enough to rise to the surface. A mediocre photographer with a properly optimized site and well captioned/ keyworded images can take business away from you. So you need to keep moving forward (because SEO is a long-term game) and improve your position in the photography industry.

Let’s get started!

1. Merge multiple websites into a single one (where appropriate)

Many photographers like to spread out their online presence into multiple sites, and then having them all link back to one main website. They hope that this will help their SEO, and we can understand why: having more links is better (both in terms of number and diversity).

But, in this case, it’s actually doing more harm than good, it’s losing much of the SEO value received from external sites.

Let’s take a fictitious example: John Doe has his main photography website at www.johndoephotography.com (which acts as his main portfolio). But then, for simplicity, he built his blog on a separate domain (like johndoephotoblog.com) and also has a separate site specifically dedicated to selling prints (johndoeprints.com). He gets various backlinks pointing to his blog and prints sites, so this will obviously in turn help his main site’s SEO, right? That’s incorrect; the opposite is true.

He is basically losing SEO “power”. If only part of those backlinks pointed directly to his main site, his SEO would be in much better shape.

Those other domains are creating a (partial) barrier between brand/social signals (“link equity”) and your main website.

By collecting all of the ranking signals on one main domain, you built the best possible SEO scenario. Why? Because of the ever-important concept of “domain authority”.

When a domain becomes more popular, it passes its importance to all its different (internal) pages, so, in turn, they rank higher in search results. But the domain importance doesn’t get passed to other websites, so that’s basically true for the blog and prints domains in the John Doe example above. Their specific domain authority is somewhat lost when linking to the main domain.

And let’s not forget about simplicity: you’re left with only one website, you can focus on it alone. The entire online marketing process becomes much easier. Branding (and SEO as well, of course) will be simpler to work on. Where isn’t this appropriate?

If the website topic is completely different (two truly separate photography specialties), it makes sense to break them into two. (But it also means you’re spreading your career into two, should you be focusing on one thing alone?)

Or sometimes it’s good to have a separate microsite for branding purposes (like promoting the images from an event on a mini online portfolio).

But for SEO purposes, one single domain is best.

Don’t take this lightly, there are exceptions. Deciding if you need to have one or multiple websites for your type(s) of work is critical, and should come before any other design or SEO considerations.

Learn how to navigate this compromise before proceeding: “Having separate photography websites or merging them?”

Further reading: 3rd part of this video (06:55) from Moz: How to Structure Links for SEO – Whiteboard Friday 2. Get a good domain name (if you don’t have one already)

You know the basic ideas: the domain should be short, memorable and, if possible, include your brand name and/or relevant keywords for your business.

Photographers usually opt for their full name (johndoe.com) and often add “photography” at the end (johndoephotography.com). Other suffixes (like “photographer” or “photo”) are less popular.

Too many people include hyphenated keywords in their domain (best-photographyin-the-world.com), but that’s not ideal. The very small SEO benefit you get from using keywords in the domain name is nothing compared to the zero branding value you have: it’s difficult to remember, it lacks credibility.

Further reading: • “Domain” knowledge base article (Moz) • How Your Domain Name Will Impact SEO & Social Media Marketing (Seach Engine Journal) • How To Choose Domain Names For SEO (SeoBook) • How to Choose the Right Domain Name (firstsiteguide.com) • New top-level-domains (TLDs) for photographers (ForegroundWeb)

3. Renew your domain for a longer time

From an SEO standpoint, it’s always best to register (or extend) your domain name for many years in advance.

It’s like a commitment. If Google notices that your domain is registered for more years to come, it considers it a sign of credibility. And that can give you a small SEO boost versus younger websites out there. Why? It’s because Google is always trying to fight spam websites (that don’t usually last more than a year).

Further reading: Google Says Domain Registrations Don’t Affect SEO, Or Do They? (Search Engine Land)

4. Host your own blog

A blog can obviously be a powerful SEO and marketing tool, and help you establish your photography brand and attract more/better clients.

But instead of using free blogging platforms like wordpress.com or others, you can gain a big SEO advantage if the blog is on your own domain. This is not to be confused with the self-hosted software from wordpress.org which gets setup on your own domain and is great for SEO.

Many photographers have a main portfolio site, but an external blog. So any links you get to your blog posts won’t help your main domain’s authority. So besides the important design implications (it might be confusing for visitors to leave the main site), you’re losing precious SEO value there.

Google loves good user experience signals, so use your blog to provide context to your readers: the way you shot those landscapes, the story behind those galleries, recent event/travel impressions, new photo gear experiments etc. Where to place the blog is a whole nother story:

For simplicity and maximum SEO benefit (and unless you have more specific reasons or constraints), place it in a subfolder (johndoe.com/blog/)

Further reading: • Setting up your new company blog. What’s better for SEO? (Rand Group) • Which is best for blog SEO: separate domain, subdomain or subfolder? (Smart Insights) • Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate (Moz Blog)

5. Set up Google Search Console

It would be a stretch to assume that verifying your site in Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools) would directly influence your site’s indexing or search rankings. So let’s not go there. But the tool provides some fantastic insights into your site’s SEO and general “health”.

At its core, Search Console allows you to monitor and manage your site’s presence in Google search results. Based on Google’s respective help page (and from my experience), Search Console can help you in many ways; it’s really an invaluable tool! Seeing that I’m such a big fan, here are some important pages inside your Search Console account that you might wish to check from time to time: • Site Messages – this should ideally always say “You have no messages.” • Search Appearance > HTML Improvements – suggestions for fixing title and meta description tags (including the site-wide duplicate meta description mistake) • Search Traffic > Search Queries – shows what people are searching for when they’re reaching your site, useful to know what your most popular content is • Search Traffic > Links to Your site – external sites linking to your website • Search Traffic > Mobile Usability – detects mobile usability issues • Google Index > Index Status – no. of pages indexed by Google, to monitor drops • Crawl > Crawl Errors – overview of any site crawling problems • Crawl > Sitemaps – tracking how many of your submitted pages have been indexed

More details about all these reports here: Webmaster Search Console Help Center

Further reading: • The SEO Guide To Getting Started With Google Webmaster Tools (Search Engine Land) • How-to Guide: 5 Ways to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Maximize Your SEO Campaign (Search Engine Journal) • How to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Maximize Your SEO Campaign (S.E. Watch) • 8 Advanced Webmaster Tools You Should Be Using for Better SEO (Entrepreneur.com, written by Neil Patel) 6. Set up Google Analytics (and enable SEO reports & internal site search)

You can’t be serious about SEO and not use a good analytics tool. Unless you need very advanced reports (heat-maps, scroll-maps, mouse tracking etc.), Google Analytics is powerful and detailed enough to keep you covered.

Setting up should be pretty straightforward, just follow this checklist: Google Analytics Training – Get the most out of your reports.

There’s a ton of info out there about using Google Analytics so I won’t bore you. Here are a few great resources you should check out: • Google Analytics for Photographers (PhotoShelter free guide) • 10 Ways to Prove SEO Value in Google Analytics (Moz Blog) • How 3 Simple Google Analytics Reports Will Increase Your Search Engine Traffic (QuickSprout) • The 8 Google Analytics Features Every Site MUST Have Enabled (KissMetrics)

A few important things, though: Google Analytics has a good integration with Search Console (of course), and you should definitely configure it and then learn to use those SEO reports.

The integration can be found in the Admin area, under “Property Settings”. Reports are in the “Acquisition” menu.

More on Google Analytics SEO reports here: New SEO Reports in Google Analytics Now Here (Moz Blog).

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to also configure your internal site search tracking (to see what people are searching for on your site). If you have multiple domains, make sure you’re correctly tracking things: How to Quickly (and Correctly) Track Google Analytics Across Multiple Domains (Moz Blog) 7. Do some planning & keyword research

I’ll be honest with you: this is a difficult topic to cover, and I was expecting a long time of writing and refining here. To my relief, I was impressed by the quality of PhotoShelter’s “SEO Guide for Photographers”:

I recommend taking some time to carefully read the entire “Planning & Competitive Assessment” chapter (pages 8-12), it contains everything you need to know about keyword research for your photography website.

Here are the relevant actions you need to know: • Generate a list of relevant keywords (general, specific, colloquial) • Check each keyword in Google’s Keyword Tool and find keyword ideas based on search volumes • Learn more about those relevant keywords by searching for them online • Study your “competition” to determine if you can indeed attract more backlinks on those specific keywords • Plan on including the “winning” keywords into your future SEO efforts I can understand this can be a daunting task, so it’s not for the faint-hearted. Even if it’s not worth your time at this stage, or it goes beyond your technical skills, you should at least read about it to familiarize yourself with the possibilities and take more informed decisions.

“It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.” – Elbert Hubbard

Further reading: • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 5: Keyword Research (Moz) • How to do Keyword Research in 90 Minutes (Moz Blog) • The Step-by-Step Guide on Improving Your Google Rankings Without Getting Penalized (Neil Patel) • How to Do Keyword Research: A Beginner’s Guide (HubSpot Blog) • The Buzz on Long Tail Keywords [Infographic] (SEO.com)

8. Submit a sitemap

For your website to show up in search results, Google has to know about all your site’s pages and index them. This can happen organically over time, but a sitemap is a faster way to “help” Google.

Technically, XML sitemaps are well-formatted lists of your site’s pages, to help search engines “know” about your site structure and update frequency. This usually speeds up the indexing process.

A respectable website platform automatically generates an XML sitemap file for search engines. But depending on how your website is built, you might not have a sitemap, making it more difficult to get indexed by search engines. So by all means, check with your developer to ensure that your site is generating a sitemap file and that it then gets properly submitted to Google Search Console. Alternatively, you can create them yourself using tools like https://www.xml- sitemaps.com/ or http://www.web-site-map.com/.

If using WordPress, this feature should automatically be included in the excellent “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin. You just need to enable it by going to “SEO > XML Sitemaps”, and it will then automatically generate a sitemap for all your posts, pages, categories etc. and then submit it to Google & Bing to speed up their indexing process. It also your post images into the sitemap, allowing them to rank higher in Google’s Image search.

9. Double check your site’s robots.txt file

The robots.txt file sits on in a site’s root (www.johndoe.com/robots.txt) and is a tool allowing you to restrict search engine from crawling specific pages or parts of the site (as well as indicate the location of your sitemap).

Very often, it is used to block all search engine crawling while the site is under development before being launched:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

When the site is ready to be launched, the file should instead (at the very least) say:

User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: PATH/sitemap.xml

It’s perfectly fine to not have a robots.txt file (and thus allow all bots to index your site), but there might be scenarios where you’ll need one to fine tune some details. Your Google Search Console account has a “robots.txt Tester” page (under the Crawl dropdown menu) which allows you to double-check that Google can access your pages.

Here’s an excellently written “Guide to the robots.txt file”. And another good one.

10. Encourage user activity with social sharing buttons

While using Like/Tweet/+1 buttons is not traditionally known for its SEO benefits, it’s clear these days that Google is also using social media signals to rank websites. Consider it “social proofing”: there’s a strong degree of correlation between social activity and top search results.

However, we need to make a distinction. There are two types of social media buttons: • social media profile links (usually in the form of small social media icons, linking to your respective profiles) • social sharing buttons (Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Twitter Follow & Tweet buttons, Google +1, Google+ Share, Pinterest “Pin It” etc.)

Here they are both in action in Tikiwaka.com‘s footer: Profile links are great, they raise awareness to your social media channels, you should include them at least on your Homepage and About page.

But sharing buttons are what we’re referring to here, and what you should consider including into every page of your website (especially the Homepage, all gallery and image pages, all blog posts).

Further reading: Why Social Sharing Buttons are so Important? (CodeBoxr)

11. Avoid using flash

Adobe Flash used to be a cool technology; it allowed creating some attractive designs (animations, crossfading, full-screen slideshows etc.) But HTML5 and CSS3 have advanced so much lately that there’s no longer a reason no to use them to create amazing photo websites. And Apple’s lack of support for Flash on iOS devices has sealed flash’s fate.

You can no longer honestly look at quality responsive WordPress themes online and still find a compelling reason to use Flash instead.

Yes, I know, it’s that Flash thing again, you’ve probably read about it already in other articles online. But it’s worth revisiting the topic from an SEO perspective.

While Google has made big improvements in Flash indexing, here are 7 compelling reasons why search engines and Flash still don’t mix. 12. Don’t use elementsWhile iframe HTML tags have their uses, it’s best to stay avoid using them.Google can technically crawl links in iframes, but not without serious problems. So unless you have a solid web-design background and/or need to pull content from your own domain to show on other pages, consider hiring a web-designer to rebuild your site properly.Further reading: • Using iFrame: SEO and Accessibility Points (Search Engine Journal) • The iframe Dilemma (Boostability Blog) • How iFrames (Don’t) Affect SEO (Tentacle Inbound)13. Don’t use obtrusive ads, annoying popups or useless splash/intro pagesSnippets from the 60+ Photography website mistakes guide: Most people hate intros of any type: flash animations, slideshows etc., anything that blocks from reaching the main navigation and homepage content. Especially annoying are intros that can’t be skipped (easily or at all). Most of the times when this happens to me, I immediately close the site, I feel that the site owner doesn’t really respect my time, trying to force me to view something.Splash pages can theoretically serve many purposes (selecting site sections/ language, making announcements, displaying ads etc.), but none of them justify blocking the user from getting to the initial content.While it’s understandable why Google would penalize sites with too many ads, the most important SEO implication comes from user experience.All of those things can be displayed in a less intrusive way in between the content blocks (a sidebar, a top bar, a slide-in popover if you must, language flags, audio symbol with the sound turned off by default).If you are keen on adding an intro for an important announcement, at least make sure the main menu is visible, and/or there’s a clear way to skip or close the intro.Google picks up on all the small site engagement signals (time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit etc.) and “values” your website accordingly.Further reading: • Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them? (Smashing Magazine) • 8 Web Design Flaws that Can Ruin your Site’s SEO (Seo Hacker) • Top Design Mistakes That Will Destroy Your Website’s SEO (StraightNorth Blog)14. Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate websitesCanonicalization is a mouthful, but it’s very important for SEO. And although it can be used for more advanced SEO things, here’s the most important thing:Your website should not show up both as www.johndoe.com and johndoe.com (with and without “www”) because they can be considered identical websites by Google (and punished for “duplicate content”).If that’s the case for your website, the solution is somewhat simple: 1. Decide how you want your site to show up (I prefer with “www” in front) 2. Redirect one to the other • If using WordPress, just go to Settings > General and update both the “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)” fields accordingly. • You can also add the proper “301 redirect” from one to the other in your hosting administration panel (instructions). 3. Set it as the preferred domain in your Google Search Console account (Gear Icon > Site Settings > Preferred Domain)Further reading: • Canonicalization (Moz) • A Guide to Canonicalization for WordPress (WPMU DEV) 15. Display pretty permalinksEver visited a WordPress site and saw this type of URL? http://www.johndoe.com/index.php?cat=183&mode=ugly&var=264a2qw7zaaIf your site does this, don’t take it personally but please know that you have ugly permalinks! There, I said it. :-) What are you going to do about it? If using WP, you’re just a few clicks away from turning them into things of beauty: http://www.johndoe.com/galleries/location/amazing-image/Just go to Settings > Permalinks and set it to “Day and name” or “Post name”.If you’re using PhotoShelter or other image management platforms, everything’s already taken care of: the URL actually contains SEO-valuable info taken from the image’s IPTC info, so Google has something more to “chew”, which is great.Leaving Google aside for a moment, pretty permalinks are also great for users who like to share your content (they either copy-paste the URL from the browser address bar into a page or email somewhere or they share it on their social media profile): a nice-looking link is more inviting, you’ll simply get more visits. Aaaand we’re back to Google: a good user experience gets noticed & helps your site rank higher in search results.Further reading: • WordPress SEO URL / Permalinks considerations (Yoast) • SEO Friendly URL Structure for WordPress (WPBeginner) • Advanced WordPress SEO: Permalink Changes & Multilingual Implementation (Moz) • The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Permalinks (ManageWP Blog) 16. Use a good SEO pluginIf you‘re not using WordPress on your site, skip this.One of the most acclaimed plugins is Yoast SEO, so I definitely recommend trying it. For starters, it allows you to define your title & meta description tags for all pages and posts on your WordPress site. But there’s a lot more stuff the plugin does behind the scenes, including generating and submitting a sitemap for you.This excellent article will teach you how to configure all of the advanced settings in the Yoast plugin.17. Optimize your page titlesIn short, <title> tags define the page and are used by search engines in search results previews. They are also displayed by browsers (usually as the tab title) and used by social media for sharing snippets. This is not to be confused with an actual headline you add as text on a page (which can be different from the title tag and has its own SEO importance). The SEO title is defined in the source code like this:<head> <title>Accurate and concise page description | Brand Name</title> </head>Best practices for optimizing your site’s title tags: 1. Dedicate some time to write unique titles for all your main site’s pages. No need to force keywords in there, just try to accurately describe that respective page. 2. If you do use keywords in the title, placing them in the beginning gives them more power. Also important for people scanning search results, they notice early words first. 3. Branding text (“John Doe Photography”) usually goes last, preceded by a pipe character (“|”) or a dash to separate it from the rest of the title. 4. Refrain from using repetitive/boilerplate titles, Google will appreciate it. 5. Length-wise, limit yourself to around 50-55 characters. Anything more usually gets truncated in search results. 6. When possible, adding modifiers can help you rank better: 2015, review, best etc.On a lighter note, the longest <title> tag I’ve seen was 327 characters long included the photographer’s name 4 times and had a ton of comma-separated keywords. A perfect keyword stuffing example.Further reading: • Title Tag (Moz) • Review your page titles and snippets (Google Search Console Help) • Title Tags & SEO: 3 Golden Rules (Search Engine Watch) • Page Title Tag Best Practice for Google (hobo Internet Marketing) 18. Optimize your page meta descriptionsSimilar to the <title> tag, the meta description can be defined in the source code like this:<head> <meta name=”description” content=”Short paragraph describing the page contents. Ideally this is unique and no longer than 150-160 characters.”/> </head>It is highly important for how search engines “understand” the page and for gaining clicks from search results pages.The common mistake is to try to cram the meta description with keywords, hoping it will help with SEO. Google is not using it as a ranking factor, so that’s a false expectation. Instead, the best thing you can do is to focus very little on keywords and instead simply compel the reader to click and find out more. The small SEO benefit (from including keywords) is dwarfed by not sparking user’s interest and not getting their click.Let’s explore the best practices for meta descriptions: • Write for humans, not search engines. Convince them the page is worth a click, and do it honestly. • Keep it shorter than 150-160 characters, but not too short either. If you make it longer, it will get truncated in search results. • Once again, don’t repeat meta description, don’t use boilerplate text, don’t end with branding copy here too (“Description… | John Doe Photography”). • Don’t use non-alphanumeric characters (especially quotes) to prevent meta descriptions from being cut off. (Single quotes are OK) There are times when Google won’t display your meta description in search results, and instead decide to use small snippets from your page content. This has two possible causes: • Your meta descriptions need to be improved; they weren’t considered good enough by Google, especially when they don’t accurate describe the page content. • The search query better matches some other parts of your content. Google knows best.Touching on this last point, some people decide not to define any meta description whatsoever, basically letting Google choose whatever snippet is most relevant for the search query. This is a valid strategy. So my recommendation is this: if you can write compelling and honest meta descriptions, do it, it will yield the best results. Otherwise, let Google extract it from the page content as needed. Further reading: • Meta Description Tag (Moz) • Meta Description Magic: Think Less about SEO & More about Click-Throughs (KissMetrics) • How to Write an Effective Meta Description (Yes, They Still Matter) (HubSpot Blog) • How To Write A Meta Description That Gets Click-Throughs (Search Engine Land)19. Stop using keywords meta tagsThis one’s easy, but I still see people doing this, so I had to mention it.Search engines have been ignoring keywords meta tags for years, so using them aggressively these days could only hurt your site or even get it flagged as spam. Simply remove them from your site. Displaying IPTC keywords on image pages is a whole nother deal. More on this later. Further reading: • Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking (Google Webmaster Central Blog) • Reasons Why You Should Stop Using Keywords Meta Tag (Cohlab) • The myths behind meta keywords (SemRush)20. Build a compelling “About” pageWhile the “About” page is a great place to include valuable content for search engines, it’s even more important for building trust with your audience (which in turn becomes an SEO signal).Although this page rarely shows up in search results on its own, it’s probably the second most visited page on a website, with big SEO value, especially if your photography website Homepage is more image-heavy (like a full-screen slideshow).Check out my in-depth article on this topic: The complete guide to photography “About” pages explores all the main details that go into creating a great “Bio” page, including tips on writing your SEO title and meta description and quality examples from photography websites. Set some time apart to read it fully and improve your “About” page.21. Add some text to your homepageOK, you’re a good photographer, and you want to convey that by displaying your images. And not just anyway, but maybe with a full-screen impressive slideshow on the Homepage, because that creates the most visual impact.That is partly true, but you’re also shooting yourself in the foot with regards to SEO. That’s because “letting your photos speak for themselves” might work with humans, but not with Google.SEO titles, meta descriptions and image ALT tags help, yes, but your should also consider adding at least a small paragraph of text in there. If not for Google, then just for first-time visitors wanting to quickly know what the site is all about.And if still keen on your image-heavy Homepage, here are a couple of strategies: 1. Compromise: huge slideshow/images at the top, text at the bottom (“below the fold”). 2. Compensate: make sure your other main site pages make up for it, text-wise.Further reading: • Optimising an Image-based Website (WebDesignFromScratch) • How to Do SEO of Image Based WebSite (ShoutMeLoud) 22. Add niche keywords in your website copyTo start with, I recommend reading about long-tail keywords in Moz’s Beginner’s SEO guide (chapter 5) (scroll to “Understanding the Long Tail of Keyword Demand”).Let’s put things into perspective: If you’re stuffing the phrase “Boston fine-art photographer” throughout your site, hoping that will rank you higher for this local search, your efforts might be in vain. It’s a highly competitive phrase, and you run the risk of over-doing it and being penalized by Google.If, instead, you write your website copy more responsibly, and your tens/hundreds/ thousands of images contain “long-tail” phrases in their metadata, you’re much more likely to build a sustainable photography business. (“Fine-art print of autumn foliage in Boston”, “Boston town hall – fine art print”, “Children playing soccer in Boston public square” etc.)Adding such niche keywords is the solution to the recent long-tail SEO strategy. Focusing only on top phrases, you miss up to 80% of the search traffic.Some ideas to get you started: • get specific about the image contents (type, date, location, subject, style, color) • use synonyms to avoid duplicate phrases • use tools like http://keywordtool.io/ or Google’s Keyword Planner for inspirationTrying this shift in SEO strategy (from popular phrases to multiple niche phrases) should lead to more variety and more search engine visibility.Further reading: • Why Long Tail Keywords Are SEO Gold (GetResponse Blog) • Why focus on long tail keywords? (Yoast) • How to Find Long Tail Keywords (BackLinko) 23. Use HTML heading tags (but only one H1 tag per page)You should ideally wrap page headlines in H1 tags (and sub-headlines throughout the page in H2/H3 tags):<h1>This is the page headline</h2>WordPress and other platforms allow defining heading tags very easily in its visual editor:WordPress does this automatically (depending on your theme), but it’s useful to double-check (by reading the theme documentation or simply right-clicking on the headline and choosing “Inspect element”). Heading tags usually also come with proportional font-sizes.But this doesn’t mean that you should use an H1 tag wherever you need larger text, which would have a detrimental effect on your SEO. Styling is done with CSS.And never use more than one H1 tag per page, that would be over-optimization. It’s perfectly fine to use several H2 and H3 tags to break up the content into separate sections though. Further reading: • How To Use H1-H6 HTML Elements Properly (hobo Internet Marketing) • How to Use Heading Tags for SEO (WooRank Blog) • The heading structure for your blog (Yoast) • How Important is an H1 Tag for SEO? (Search Engine Journal) 24. Add date info to blog posts (Last updated, Last modified, Published on…)Let’s take a quick look back at a Google search result:The date is automatically picked up by Google from the post‘s date in the byline. Google loves fresh content. So posting dates (publish date or, better yet, last- modified date) in blog posts is a great way to make your search results more enticing.Google also automatically gets post dates from the XML sitemap you submit, but adding dates as text in your themes helps too. Further reading: Why You Should NOT Remove Dates from Your WordPress Blog Posts (WPBeginner)25. Simplify your site’s footerThe footer is supposed to be just a nice ending to a page, a small please with contact info and maybe a few navigation items to help users browse to a new page.Instead, it is often over-optimized and it becomes a dumping ground for a lot of content that doesn’t fit elsewhere in the site. Here are some common mistakes being made: • links to (too) many galleries • keyword-stuffed “About” snippets • a full sitemap • many graphics (Flickr/Instagram widgets, client logos) • comma-separated keywordsInstead, the footer is a good place for: • Links to a few of the main pages • Contact info (at least a clickable email) • Address/location • Copyright infoThis great article from Kiss Metrics says it all:“The only type of footer optimization that you should do is not to do it.”26. Reduce site-wide linksThis goes hand-in-hand with my footer notes above. Site-wide links are commonly present in footers or blog sidebars (using “Blogroll” widgets).Google is obviously taking a rational approach: more (duplicate) links lose a lot of their SEO value. So it makes no sense to link to friend or industry sites in your blog sidebar, those links are heavily disregarded. You’re simply “encouraging” people to leave your site instead of making them stick around your site longer. Let’s look at it from another way too: on a single blog post, do those sidebar links relate to the topic at hand? Most likely they’re not, so it might make more sense to place them only once on the Homepage, or to remove them altogether.Further reading: • A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing – The Dumb Practice Of Site Wide Links (SEO Sherpa) • SiteWide BackLinks : Good or Bad for SEO? (ShoutMeLoud) • Penguin: The Sitewide Link Slayer (RewindSEO)27. Disable (or prevent indexing of) some unnecessary WordPress archivesOut of the box, WordPress comes with a lot of taxonomies: daily/monthly/yearly, category, tag, author archives. If all of these exist and are indexed by Google, they could be seen as duplicate content (and therefore hurt your SEO).Here are some recommended settings for the Yoast SEO plugin: • Titles & Metas > Other tab • Sitewide meta settings > Subpages of archives > noindex • Sitewide meta settings > Use meta keywords tag > Disabled • Titles & Metas > Post Types tab • Media > Meta Robots: index • Titles & Metas > Taxonomies tab • Tags > Meta Robots > noindex • Format > Meta Robots> noindex • Titles & Metas > Archives tab • Author archives > Disabled • Date archives > Disabled Further reading: • WordPress SEO – The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For WordPress Sites (sections 3, 3.1, 3.2) (Yoast) • No Indexing WordPress Taxonomies: Do or Don’t (Search Engine Journal) • The Advanced Guide to SEO – Chapter 04: WordPress (QuickSprout)28. Avoid keyword stuffing or “black-hat” SEO practicesWhen you start learning some magic spells and tricks (aka the power of SEO), aren’t you tempted to also experiment with black magic? :-) Don’t try to “game” the system. Yes, you know who you are!Don’t force keywords into your content. Repeating certain phrases in all your page titles or gallery names is frowned upon. You should instead craft your text so that it always reads naturally.Don’t use invisible texts. Search engines are becoming really smart, they can detect if you set the text color to be the same as the background in order to hide keyword- heavy texts from users. Don’t buy links. Purchasing links to your site from link farms has already gotten out of hand a few years ago, it can now get your site banned from search engines. Let your incoming links grow organically!Further reading: • Hey mister SEO, what’s up with the black hat? (SEO Hacker) • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 9: Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines (Moz) • The Inconvenient Truth About SEO (Smashing Magazine) • Exploring the Dark Arts of SEO: Search Engine Optimisation Part 1 & Part 2 (Liz Pearce) • Black Hat Optimization – The Dark Side of SEO (Verda Design) • SEO-Optimized Web Content: How Do You Optimize Without Overdoing It? (SocialMediaToday)29. Avoid using overly difficult or spammy text, use natural language insteadFirst of all, don’t blog only for SEO purposes.Even if you’re working hard to optimize your posts for Google’s eyes, make sure you’re also writing quality content for humans (great storytelling, personal recommendations, honest opinions). Stuffing your blog posts with keywords can make them “smell” of spamming, you risk alienating your audience.But it’s also a matter of increasing your text readability (to appeal to a larger audience): • breaking up text into shorter paragraphs • adding sub-headings where appropriate • increasing font-size and line-height • using free readability level checking tools Otherwise, if Google find’s your page to have a high user reading level, your site will sometimes be marginalized.Further reading: • Better Readability = Better SEO (Hello SEO Copyrighting) • The importance of readability in SEO (BoastingBiz) • What is Readability for SEO & Online Readability Calculator (ShoutMeLoud) • SEO Copywriting: How To Write Content For People & Optimize For Google (Neil Patel)30. Make your website mobile-friendly (responsive) and confirm it with GoogleI’m sure you’re aware of the current trends towards smartphones and tablets, more and more people are browsing website when on the go (or when standing still, on their sofa, on their tablet, for convenience).Your website should not force mobile users to have to pinch and zoom, and that’s where responsive sites come into play. When being viewed on a small screen, the layout and content of the pages adapt to the screen size, resizing and repositioning elements as needed to create a good experience. This is especially important for photography websites, which should automatically resize images to fit the screen size of the user’s device, and still keep it interactive (ex: swipe to change images).To make things even more important, Google recently started displaying a “Mobile-friendly” label to responsive search results on mobile devices. This provides a great signal for users that they’ll have a good browsing experience, and Google is rewarding that.A responsive site provides a great browsing experience for your users, and Google is rewarding that!There aren’t any simple shortcuts you can take to make your site mobile-friendly, it’s something you should consider investing in a web-designer for, or at least test your site.Once you do make your website responsive, and have confirmed it Google’s free tool, make sure Google Search Console also no longer lists any pages as having errors (Search Console > Search Traffic > Mobile Usability).Mobile-friendliness testing tools: • <a href="/tags/Google_Developers/" rel="tag">Google Developers</a> – Mobile-Friendly Test • Varvy Mobile SEO toolFurther reading: • The SEO of Responsive Web Design (Moz Blog) • Mobile-Friendly Websites (Google Developers – Mobile Guide) • Varvy Mobile SEO (“Mobile SEO Articles” section) • 4 SEO Benefits of Responsive Web Design (Search Engine Journal) • Google’s Gary Illyes Discusses Mobile as a Ranking Factor (StoneTemple Consulting) In 2015, Google announced it will soon start penalizing non mobile-friendly websites: • Google May Penalize Non Mobile-Friendly Sites (Ryan Allen on Medium)31. Optimize your site for first-time visitorsOnly a small percentage of your website visitors are returning users, people who are already aware of your work and have the patience to read your content carefully.The large majority of your traffic is most likely made up of first-time visitors, with a short attention span. They don’t sit down to fully explore a website, they just quickly scan it (in various predictable patterns) to see if it fits their needs.That’s why overwhelming them with too many options can, in fact, lead them away.A great place to start would be this post on how to simplify your website and only emphasize the key elements on a page (while removing the “fluff”): Embracing minimalism in your photography website Let’s explore some ideas to optimize your site for new visitors: • Simplify your navigation • Simplify your homepage (especially the area above the fold) and provide clear “paths” into your site areas • Avoid splash screens or auto-playing music (users hate them!) • Provide easy access to your contact info (more tips here) • Have clear call-to-action buttons (always guide the user to a next piece of content) • Include a quick statement paragraph on the homepage (a quick description of what the site is all about, to avoid any confusion) • Display fresh content (“Recent blog posts”, “Recent galleries”)Further reading: • What the highest converting websites do differently (KissMetrics) • The first rule of web design (Seth Godin)32. Reduce bounce ratesWhen a user lands on your website, Google “notices” if they bounce back to search results, or instead they start browsing through your site.PhotoShelter’s SEO Guide for Photographers excellently covers this topic:Google defines a “bounce” as a visitor who looks at the first page of your site and does not click to any other pages (i.e., exits after seeing that one page and presumably deciding your site’s content does not match their search interests.) Your bounce rate for search traffic should go down if your search terms are effectively driving relevant traffic. In terms of targeting an optimal bounce rate, […] it is widely quoted that an average bounce rate across all websites is 40%, and from our experience with a lot of photographer websites, anything under 50% or so and you are probably doing OK. But bounce rate can vary depending on the type of photography and the type of traffic you’re generating. For example, celebrity/red carpet photography sites tend to have relatively high search engine-based traffic, but it’s not necessarily qualified buyers who are seeking it. […] A high bounce rate, in this case, isn’t indicative of bad content – it’s merely a symptom of having popular content with a broad (consumer) audience.Optimizing bounce rates obviously comes down to having a clean and modern website design, a site that increases user engagement (through useful internal links, calls-to-action, well-written copy etc.).Some of the main bounce causes are: • once again, splash/intro pages & auto-playing music • very long paragraphs • poor headlines • keyword-stuffing (getting un-targeted visitors through irrelevant keyword searches) • broken links • slow websites • poor design or not mobile-optimizedFurther reading: • What is Bounce Rate, And Should Photographers Care? (Tiffinbox – great article) • How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate (QuickSprout) • 19 Simple Tips to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate Today (VentureHarbour) • Bounce Rate Demystified (KissMetrics) • Dwell Time: Does This Ranking Factor Really Live Up to the Hype? (aHrefs) 33. Increase your site’s usabilityPhotographers are sometimes overly-concerned with the visual aspects of the site, at the expense of usability. Important areas of the site should be accessible in as few clicks as possible.Visitors should find it intuitive to navigate the site, so here are a few best practices: • the menu should be placed either on the top or the left side • whatever the location, the menu should be in a consistent place throughout the site • a quick way to get back to the homepage should always be present (usually through a “Home” menu item, or by clicking on the logo) • the site should require as few steps as possible to get to your desired destination (contact page, image level, purchase page etc.) • no splash/intro pages, no unnecessary clicks (how many times have I mentioned this already?) • easy ways to navigate through images (keyboard navigation is a bonus), and to return to gallery/collection pagesDon’t just rely on people using their browser back/forward buttons. Help them navigate through the site with links back to parent galleries/categories. And don’t forget to gather feedback from other people testing your site (either directly or on a global level using Google Analytics), it can be very insightful.Notes on menu items: Carefully consider the actual words you use in your navigation. When browsing websites, people instantly recognize familiar names for navigation links. Your site should, therefore, avoid using weird names for menu items, they only slow down users in taking a decision, they hurt the website’s usability. One of the most frequent mistakes is calling your Contact page something like “How to reach me/us”. Some people link to a Services page using “What we do”. Always try going for simple one-word navigation links, and browse around for website examples to see what other people are using.Notes on menu dropdowns: try to keep them as few as possible, they are usually annoying to visitors and they also make people skype the top-level menu options, reducing the visits to your more important pages in the site.Notes on image thumbnails: in rare cases, photography gallery pages only allow clicking on the text underneath each thumbnail (usually the image title or filename). Make sure your entire thumbnail is clickable on your site, not just the text. It’s a visual medium, people expect to be able to click the image directly, it’s a larger target for the mouse pointer.Further reading: • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 6: How usability, user experience & content affect search engine rankings (Moz) • Usability Mistakes to Avoid When Using Photos in Your Website (Design Instruct) • SEO and Usability (Nielsen Norman Group) 34. Improve your site’s speed/performanceRegular visitors hate slow websites. Photo buyers hate slow sites. Google does too. There’s a clear pattern here. Site speed is an important reliability factor in SEO algorithms.Most of the time, you’re locked into the page structure provided by your CMS, and the same goes for web server optimization. But there are a few things you can do to reduce website load times.First of all, don’t underestimate the importance of a solid web hosting provider. If your server is slow, it doesn’t matter how you build your site, you could be waiting for several seconds before the first byte is received. I’ve had a good experience with HostGator so far if you’re looking for an inexpensive solution (and unless you’re relying solely on hosted image management solutions like PhotoShelter). If you have a WordPress site and you need top quality, go for WPEngine.If you’re using WordPress, caching can really improve your site’s load speed. Using a plugin like W3 Total Cache does all the hard work, the principle is simple: it creates copies of your dynamic content as HTML pages (among other things) and serves them to browsers instead of having to generate all the content for each visitor. It can also help integrate with a CDN for greater speed unless your website (or hosting provider) already does this.Other possible elements impacting page load speed: • quality of the source code (badly-coded templates/themes) • flash elements • audio/video • slow servers • page redirects • non-optimized images (see below) • too many scripts • some social media buttons Investing in a quality theme and/or a professional web-developer to make your website fast will pay dividends, in the long run. A big part of your visitors will leave the site if it takes too long to load, even if have quality content.Free site speed testing tools: • Google’s own PageSpeed Insights (or as a Chrome extension) • Pingdom Website Speed Test • WebPageTest • GTmetrixFurther reading: • A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization (Kinsta – excellent overview) • Pagespeed (Varvy – a ton of great articles explaining Google’s PageSpeed results) • How Load Time Affects Google Rankings [infographic] (QuickSprout) • 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Website – and Improve Conversion by 7% (CrazyEgg) • How to Make Your Site Insanely Fast (QuickSprout) • Performance Unleashed: How To Speed Up WordPress Load Times (DIYthemes) • 11 Low-Hanging Fruits for Increasing Website Speed (and Conversions) (ConversionXL)35. Optimize your photosBesides taking an overall look at your site performance, also check how big your images are being displayed on the site, and only upload images of that size.I’ve seen this happen very often: browsers struggle to load full-resolution images simply to then resize and display them at 1000 pixels or less. Make sure your images are exported/uploaded at a good size (as dictated by their display size on the site), saved as JPG (instead of PNG, TIFF, RAW), and a decent compression level (60- 70% quality, as low as you can without starting to introduce too much noise, it’s a compromise). There are obvious exceptions for this: if you plan on offering prints and image licenses on your site, those need to use your high-quality full-size images (with security measures in place). But your site should be able to automatically generate smaller images just for display purposes, and only provide the high-quality images when actually needed.Compress your images online with Imagify (or their WP plugin), or use software like ImageOptim (Mac) / PNGGauntlet (Win) or others.Another time consumer sometimes is having too many images in a bad slideshow. You need to make sure that you slideshow loads images dynamically as you navigate through it. Some websites still need to wait to load all images before starting the actual slideshow, which is obviously a bad thing.Further reading: • Image Optimization: How to Rank on Image Search (Search Engine Watch) • How to Optimize Images for Better Search Engine Rankings (DIYthemes) • 7 Ways to Optimize Image <a href="/tags/Files_(Google)/" rel="tag">Files</a> for SEO (Business2Community) • 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips (Shopify) • 6 Tips on Image SEO (TopRank Blog)36. Optimize website graphicsBesides your photography, your website template surely uses small graphics/files for design. These can also impact site speed.Three very small social media icons can take more time to load than one single slideshow image (because it’s not just a matter of total file size, the browser has to make a bunch of server requests for files, and these take up precious time). A good read is Google’s “Image optimization” guide. It provides everything you need to know about optimizing site graphics: file formats, compression types, vector graphics, retina display implications etc.You should also check out: How to resize, export & compress images for optimal website performance37. Always add image ALT tagsIf you have no experience with HTML, here’s what you need to know: whenever an image appears on your site, it uses the following source code format:That value inside that ALT tag is the main point of interest for Google when looking to “understand” an image (the others being the filename and the text around the image on the page). Search engines don’t have the practice of looking into IPTC/ EXIF information yet, so you can see why the ALT tag is important if you care about SEO.Browsers also usually display the ALT tag in a tooltip when hovering over an image. The (recommended) maximum length of the ALT text is 16 words though this is hard to test. And no comma-separated keywords here, it should either be descriptive/helpful or none at all. Your website platform should ideally automatically fill-in the ALT tag using one of the main IPTC fields (like PhotoShelter does), or at least allow you to easily define it (like WordPress does). On the topic of ALT tags, here’s an informative snippet from Google:Not so good: Better: Best: To be avoided Filling alt attributes with keywords (“keyword stuffing”) results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be perceived as spam. Instead, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.Further reading: • How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images (DigitalSherpa) • How Many Words In ALT Text For Google (hobo Internet Marketing) • The basics of using Alt Text for SEO (Econsultancy) • Writing Great Alt Text (About.com Tech) • The Importance of ALT Attributes (9Clouds) 38. Add keywords in image filenamesSure, you might be displaying IPTC fields for your visitors. But what about filenames?Search engines cannot understand the contents of an image (yet), all they can understand is that your image contains a… DSC0001. Or they find out that in your photo there’s a person called… IMG0004. Nobody will search for that on Google.It’s true that image ALT tags, along with IPTC information, are responsible for properly describing an image. But filenames simply provide extra info about your images to search engines.And if your images do show up in Google search results, filenames are sometimes used as description snippets, thus being of value to the users too.So just like with ALT tags, it makes sense to add descriptive keywords into the filename, instead of leaving the default camera-assigned ones (DSC0001.JPG).Filename best practices: • try to make it no longer than 3-4 words • separate words using dashes (spaces are fine too, but no underscores) • skip stop words (he, she, the, a etc.)A side-effect of having keyword-rich filenames is that images become more likely to show up in Google Image search results.Google’s “Image publishing guidelines” reinforce the importance of image filenames: “The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new- black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we’re unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we’ll use the filename as the image’s snippet in our search results.” Further reading: • How to optimise your images for SEO (Econsultancy) • The Ultimate Guide for Web Images and SEO (Internet Marketing Ninjas) • Image Optimization – File Name Important? (Moz Q&A Forum)39. Display image IPTC metadataNot only does this affect SEO, but how are people supposed to always know the contents depicted in your photos? Image captions provide real value to both humans & search engines: • specific person names, objects, locations, date, time of day (where applicable) • scientific names • storytelling (your travel experiences, problems you had, obstacles you overcame) • abstract meanings (depending on the type of photography)Rosa Frei displays image IPTC details (as well as searchable keywords) under enlarged photos. Well written captions can make people relate to your images. Same thing applies to gallery descriptions: it’s a great way to inform visitors about that specific group of photos.The first step is obviously to add IPTC info to all your images in your preferred image management software (like Adobe Lightroom), before uploading them to your site. Displaying that IPTC info is only the second step and should simply be a matter of enabling it in your CMS of choice.For example, PhotoShelter allows you to very easily display image captions and keywords on their respective image pages, while their internal “SEO Grader” tool explains their importance well: • “A descriptive caption is a crucial element of an image’s online display. Not only does a caption help educate your site visitors about an image, it also tells the search engines what they’re looking at.” • “Keywords are one of the most efficient ways to tell a search engine about your images. A search engine cannot determine on its own what is displayed in an image, so it’s up to you to provide text, such as 5-20 keywords per image, to place it in context. Important note: Search engines will penalize you from displaying the same word too many times on one page, so use discretion – never “keyword bomb” your images.” • “Proper keywording is very beneficial to image-level SEO. The first step is to ensure that an image has 5-20 keywords assigned in its metadata. The second is to ensure that this set of keywords is displayed on the page alongside the image. It’s not enough to have keywords assigned to images if these keywords do not appear on the screen.”Looking into the future, Google is starting to understand what an image actually contains, it looks quite interesting. But until it does it well (and that’s a big “if”), manually-entered metadata is all you can do to help your SEO cause. 40. Optimize your site for local searchI big trend in the SEO world is toward local search. target-iconBoth mobile and desktop search results are starting to display location-specific results (even when there was no location being asked for as a keyword), by using your device’s IP address or your networks public location.So if your photography business has a local component, optimizing your site to tailor to that specific area is a must.Here are places where you can include location info (city, state, country): • SEO title tag and/or meta description • The first heading on the homepage • In your About and Contact pages (!) • In gallery titles/description • In image ALT tags and IPTC metadataAs locations-specific queries become more popular, your location can sometimes make all the difference for clients staring confused at Google search results.Further reading: • Everybody Needs Local SEO (Moz Blog) • Optimizing Your Website for Local Search (Moz Local) • Local SEO In 2015 – Look At The Big Picture (Search Engine Land) • How To Optimize Your WordPress Site For Local Search (ElegantThemes) 41. Add your business info to Google My Business (for more local search exposure)Firstly, let’s start with WHY.When doing some geographic-specific searches (like “melbourne photographer”), Google sometimes displays a huge Maps component above the standard results.It’s obviously great if you can reach that list, and it all starts with you creating a free Google My Business account.If you’ve previously heard about “Google Places for Business” or “Google+ Pages”, they’re all the same, they’ve been re-branded into “Google My Business”. Extra tip: if you have an embedded Google map on your Contact page, be sure to point it to your actual Google My Business location directly.Further reading: • Google My Business – Be found • Get Your Business To 100% In Google My Business (Search Engine Land) • Cracking Local SEO: A Guide to Google My Business in 2015 (FirstPageSage) • 5 Things Most People Forget About Local SEO (Neil Patel for Entrepreneur) • Local Business SEO: Everything You Need to Know (Pam Aungst)42. Use relevant anchor texts when linking back to your siteBefore we dive into link building strategies (the “bread and butter” of SEO), it’s important to first note the importance of anchor texts.Whenever you add a link somewhere, the HTML language allows specifying which text actually gets turned into the link. This has some great uses: • You can link inline text to other website, without writing their entire URL there • You describe the link destination to Google (!)Using my site as an example, there’s a huge difference between: You can read photography web-design articles here.… and: Go here to read photography web-design articles.It’s an over-simplified example, but you get the idea. In the first example, Google understands that the website is about… “here” (although it tries to understand a little more of the entire sentence, not just the anchor text). In the second example, there’s a lot more context in the anchor text. So whenever you have links pointing back to your site, try to improve their anchor text, it can greatly improve yourSEO in the long run.Further reading: • Anchor Text (Moz) • Anchor Text and SEO (wikiweb) • A Basic Guide for Anchor Text (ahrefs Blog) • Link Building: Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices (BuiltVisible)43. Get quality links back to your siteThe quantity and quality of incoming links to your website (“backlinks”) are huge SEO factors. Link building is the hardest (and most powerful) parts of SEO.Search engines like Google consider backlinks as “votes of confidence”, therefore ranking you higher for the keywords that fit the bill.It makes sense to start with any photography-specific profiles pages you can control. Think of all the sites you have profiles on: • associations • memberships • contests you took part in • vendor/partner sites • trade groups • forums • communities • event sites you’ve shot for • guest posts you’ve written • basically, anywhere your name/brand shows up online Inside each of those profile pages, you can most likely place a link to your own site.Besides these self-created links, and excluding buying links from the equation, you’re left with the natural process of gaining links over time. There’s no shortcut here, no quick tip you can employ. It’s just a matter of creating worthy content day in and day out, and your ability to raise awareness about it.Tracking inbound links can be done in Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Links to Your Site) or using tools like MOZ Open Site Explorer.Further reading: • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 7: Growing Popularity & Links (Moz – highly recommended) • What are Backlinks? (PDN online) • The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever (PointBlankSEO) • 19+1 Ways To Cleverly Get Natural Backlinks To Your Blog (BloggerTipsTricks) • 59 Amazing Organic Link Building Articles (CognitiveSEO)44. Get your social media profiles to link back to your siteI don’t need to tell you that social media is crucial these days to running a successful business. And especially a photography business (since photography is such a powerful medium).But you should never lose sight of the big picture: your own website is the core of your business. “You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing the small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” – Alvin TofferSocial media profiles are just marketing hubs, allowing you to spread the message, to promote your work, and to bring people back to your site.With this in mind, make sure that all your social media hubs link back to your website:And while you’re at it, also set up an effective email signature.Further reading: • The Top 5 Off-Page Optimisation Factors (Search Engine People) • Beginner’s Guide to Social Media (Moz) • Matt Cutts: Facebook, Twitter Social Signals Not Part of Google Search Ranking Algorithms (Search Engine Watch) 45. Clean up spam links to your siteSometimes you will get low-quality backlinks (from hiring shady SEO companies to buy cheap links for you, or from trying to get unnatural links yourself). Google is obviously against spam links of any kind, so, once in a while, you should clean up your backlinks.Tools to find bad backlinks: • Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Links to Your Site) • MajesticWhat to look for: • Low-quality sites with a big number of external links • Links with over-optimized anchor texts (comma-separated keywords) • Site-wide links (bad sites linking to you in a footer or sidebar)What to do with them: • Contact the site owner and request to remove those specific links (this should always be your first action though it can be a daunting task sometimes) • Use Google’s link disavow toolFurther reading: • A new tool to disavow links (Google Webmaster Central Blog) • How To Clean Up Bad Links and Establish Trust With Link Vendors (Search Engine Journal) • Clean up your bad backlinks (Yoast) • How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO (KissMetrics) 46. (Don’t be afraid to) link to external sitesThere is this myth of losing “SEO juice” if you link to external sites, making people not link to other sites (or just link internally). SEO doesn’t work like that. Not to mention that you’re not serving your audience/readers best, you’re hiding links from them for your own perceived benefit.You can see that after each SEO action in this article, I’ve included a “Further reading” section, linking to relevant quality articles online. Is it helpful to you? If so, why would Google “punish” my site’s SEO, it makes no sense. Linking to other authoritative sites is an indication that you respect other people’s content, and it becomes a trust signal to Google (a trust signal for your own website too!)So when you’re blogging, don’t be afraid to link to other sites, and instead focus on producing your best content.Further reading: • External Links (Moz) • Importance of Outbound Links for SEO (ShoutMeLoud) • High Quality External Links: What They Are and Why You Need Them (Cohlab) • Why and How to Use External Links (About.com Tech) • How Does Linking to Another Website Affect SEO? (Blue Corona) 47. Double-check your entire site for spelling, grammar, semantics, demo content & outdated contact infoProperly testing your site before launching it should not be neglected. But even afterward, it pays to do a monthly review of the entire site and check your new/ recent content for mistakes (new blog posts, new gallery descriptions etc.) and double-check your contact info.You’d be amazed how many photographers changed their phone number but then forgot to also update their site’s contact info.And don’t just try to review it yourself, you need “outside” people to give you feedback. A fresh pair of eyes can spot a lot of small details. A site tester (even if it’s just a friend or relative) can give you some interesting insights (“I was confused on that page, I didn’t know where to contact you…”) or report weird things (“Everything was fine in Safari, but I tried your site in Firefox and the homepage was all messed up…”).Regularly check your site for: • spelling, grammar, semantics (I’m a fan of Grammarly) • outdated contact info • outdated Bio details (“X years ago”) • outdated copyright info (“Copyright 2013”) • broken navigation (removed a page recently?) • dummy/test content (the words “Lorem ipsum” should not be present)Further reading: • SEO Advice: Spell-check your web site (Matt Cutts Blog) • Are spelling and grammar SEO ranking factors? (SteamFeed) • Does Spelling and Grammar Effect SEO? (Moz Q&A Forum) 48. Scan and fix broken linksBroken links send users to non-existing web pages, so they’re obviously important to not have. They can be bad for your site’s usability, reputation, and SEO. If you find broken links in the future, take the time to replace or remove each one.For some info and tools on this topic, here’s an article I wrote: Broken link checker tools for photographersFor inbound links (“backlinks”), you can use the Google combo: Search Console (Crawl > Crawl Errors) and Analytics (to spot visits landing on a 404 error page), and then you can fix them by either asking the site owners to a link update or adding a redirect yourself.Further reading: • How To Capture Broken Inbound Links (Search Engine Land) • How to Capture Broken Inbound Links: 3 Simple Steps (Teknicks) • Find and Fix Broken Inbound Links (IT Shared Services) 49. Test your site with (free) SEO toolsAfter all your hard work on the site’s SEO, it’s time for testing.You should spend some time going through some of these tools and figure out which ones give you the most valuable insights, depending on your goals. You’d be amazed how much difference a good tool can make, displaying SEO data in creative ways.Fortunately, there are a number of free tools that can help you reach your SEO goals. They all have slightly specific purposes, but building a good arsenal of powerful tools will make you master the game of SEO.Here are some great round-up posts of free SEO tools: • 50+ completely free SEO tools with no credit card or registration needed (Sustained Surge – great comprehensive list) • 21 Simple and Free SEO Tools to Instantly Improve Your Marketing (Buffer Blog) • The 100 Best Free SEO Tools & Resources for Every Challenge – Interactive (Moz Blog) • The Best SEO & Marketing Tools Ever (Saijo George – huge interactive list) • My 15 Favorite Free SEO Tools (LunaMetrics) • SEO Tool by VarvyAnd last but not least…50. Schedule to regularly track your SEO efforts and adapt your strategiesIf you’re serious about your website, measuring your SEO progress on a regular basis is a must (I recommend at least once a month). SEO is not a one-time effort. “Celebrate any progress. Don’t wait to get perfect.” – Ann McGee CooperWhat I like to do is to bookmark all pages (including social media accounts, news sites, and anything else that I need to check on a regular basis), group them all in a folder (your browser most likely allows bookmark folders) and then open them all at once. Like a regular website “health” check.Here are relevant metrics/reports you can keep an eye on: • Overall stats inside Google Analytics • Total number of visitors (Dashboard) • Visitors via search (Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels) • Keywords used to find you (Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels & Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries) • Relevant reports inside Google Search Console (see above) • Google searches • “site:domain.com” (number of indexed pages) • same thing in Google Images • MOZ Open Site Explorer (Inbound Links, Just-Discovered etc. All of them!) • Majestic (backlinks and many other reports) • Reports from your preferred SEO tools mentioned aboveFurther reading: • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 10: Measuring & Tracking Success (Moz) • Best Practices for Measuring SEO Success (Search Engine Journal) • How to measure SEO results – the 5 KPIs you need to know (FirstPageSage) • 10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics (Search Engine Land) • How to Measure SEO Success (Search Engine Watch) • How to measure SEO success in Google Analytics (Ranking Elite) ConclusionThere are obviously many things you can do to maximize your site’s SEO and ultimately get found online & improve your photography business. If you’re not leveraging SEO to get more website traffic, now is the best time to start!And if you only took one main idea from this article, it is this: search engines are looking more and more closely at user experience signals across the web, at how users browse your website, instead of relying only on keywords and links to rank websites. SEO is no longer focused solely on keyword-rich copywriting but on providing the best possible browsing experience for your target audience (with a fast, mobile-friendly and honest website).Build an amazing photo website that people love, and Google will follow!Hope you find this SEO guide useful. Here’s to better photography websites! – AlexIf you’re overwhelmed, you can hire me to work on your site’s SEO. My in-depth SEO review (exclusively for photographers!) includes everything comprehensive on-site SEO work and 1-on-1 consulting to help move your website hire in the rankings. FOREGROUNDWEBOne single SEO tip to rule them allThe one common thread through all of the SEO tips was that the best way to make Google happy is to make your visitors happy.And I want to build up on this idea because the shift in mindset is important.Since there were search engines, website owners have been finding ways to game the system and make their sites rank higher for certain keywords. But Google is always one step ahead, continually changing their algorithms to prevent any dishonest or spammy tactics. How do they do that? They constantly figure out how people make browsing choices, and turn those into ranking factors: • Do people stay longer on a responsive site because the browsing experience is better? Google will take notice. • Are people navigating the site easily and browsing more pages? (this related to various Google Analytics stats: pages/visit, avg. time on site, bounce rate). Google will think this site is worth more. • Are your blog posts useful and honest, and are people linking to and sharing them? Then your site is important in Google’s eyes too.As you can see, user satisfaction is a huge ranking factor (confirmed here).About half of the SEO tips I wrote about are, in some way, related to caring about your audience (while the rest are more technical aspects you can do behind the scenes to “please” Google).How to pay more attention to your audience instead of Google?• For every main page on your website, ask yourself: • Why are people coming to this page? • When first-time visitors land on this page, can they find the information they were looking for quickly? • What other page(s) should they navigate to after this one? • What’s the fluff that can be removed from the page? • When writing page titles and meta descriptions, think about how they would look in search results, how to best encourage users to give you their click. Don’t just stuff them with keywords for Google’s sake. • Keep learning. Sometimes your preferences are not aligned with what users like. You might be honest in thinking that splash pages and auto-playing music help set the mood, but you might also be wrong. Remember that you’re not building the site for you, but for your audience. So learn who they are and what they like. PhotoShelter’s survey titled “What buyers want” is a good place to start. • Improve the browsing experience for mobile users, test your site on smartphones and tablets. Can people view your slideshows or purchase your prints from a phone? • Ask friends/colleagues to test your site and give you some feedback. Notice any common patterns in their answers? • Browse a few top photographer websites out there. What can you learn from them? What aspects do you enjoy when browsing their sites? • And obviously, commit to always creating “epic” content: remove the filler images and only publish unmistakable value. Inspire people with your work!This change in mindset can set you apart & differentiate your online presence.There are many SEO details you need to work on (and I recommend you go through my SEO guide and spend some time on them). But always focus more on providing value to people. First, figure out what your target audience really is, and then go “above and beyond” in providing useful content to them.By doing this, it will be impossible not to rank well in Google. FOREGROUNDWEBA simpler approach to writing your SEO titles and meta-descriptionsIf you don’t know what the SEO title and meta description are, go ahead and read points #17 and #18 from my SEO guide for photographers. In short, they are text values (you can customize) which don’t show up on the site but which end up in search results: What you usually learn is to do keyword research and then “craft” the SEO titles and meta-descriptions to include your target keywords/phrases as much as possible.Let me introduce you to the concept of “click- through rate”In technical terms, it’s the percentage of search engine users that click on your site’s link after seeing it in search results.In plain English: how appealing your SEO title and meta-description are to users.Too many photographers are over-doing SEO, only thinking about “tricking” Google into ranking high for certain words.Instead, you should focus a lot more on humans and how they understand your SEO tags when seeing them in search results. That’s why “fake” keyword-rich phrases perform badly these days.So, how do you write the SEO fields? If you hate SEO (because you’d rather be shooting pictures) and you’re overwhelmed by “keyword research”, you’ll definitely find some comfort in this simpler approach:Write your SEO titles & meta-descriptions as if you were describing the site to an acquaintance over dinner (using natural language). Why “dinner” in particular you ask? Because after enjoying a glass of wine, you loosen up and speak more naturally, instead of being over-anxious to describe all the details of your site :-)Let’s take the meta-description for example. After finishing the main dinner course and enjoying your glass of wine, you wouldn’t be telling your friend that your website is about:“Your stock photography source for Austin, Texas Lifestyle, Skyline, People, Family, Travel, Sports, Business & Landscape stock images.”That sounds a little fake when spoken out loud, the enumeration of the keywords is too long. Also notice how “stock” is placed there twice to rank higher for it.Instead you’d naturally tell the person that the site is about this:“Professional stock photography agency based in Austin, Texas, providing a wide range of stock images for commercial and editorial use.”This way, you still repeat the word “stock”, but it all sounds more natural. So the goal is to make your website look appealing in search results. You won’t do that by cramming comma-separated keywords in there in a desperate attempt to rank higher, it will instead have the opposite effect and Google will take notice. Here are some more examples of naturally-sounding SEO meta-descriptions as seen in Google search results (I’ve anonymized them):“African landscape and wildlife photography by award-winning Botswana based nature photographer Jane Doe.”“ProfessionalNYC based photography agency specialized in babies, children, teens and school photography.”“Jane Doe Images is a sports photo agency, providing top quality, striking images with impact from the world of rugby union & other sports.”“We love making imaginative photos of individuals, couples, families and weddings. We’re based in the beautiful, leafy suburb of Croydon, Melbourne.”“New Jersey advertising photographer specialized in creating inspired imagery for commercial and editorial photography clients.”“Jane Doe is an international award-winning photographer from Brisbane, specializing in location shoots for commercial and editorial clients across southeast Queensland.”Notice how they can all be spoken out loud and still sound natural. Back to the dinner party metaphor: don’t assume your friend knows too much about you or your site. If it helps, imagine they’re a complete stranger. When describing your page, you’d then make sure you include all the important and relevant things (like your location and your main specialties, awards, featured publications, etc.)So try to describe your site out loud, using natural language. Then write it all on a piece of paper and then edit it down till you can extract the SEO title and meta- description from it. FAQsIs it true that I need to include the most important keywords at the beginning of the SEO title & meta-description? Technically, yes, but you’re over-thinking SEO again. Try to keep it simple.How long should the SEO title and meta-description be? Title < 50-55 characters (including spaces). Meta-description < 140-150 characters (including spaces).Test them out here and make sure they don’t get truncated with an ellipsis.How can I know what my site’s click-through rates are? To test things out, you can measure you click-through rates in Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).You need to go to: Search Traffic > Search Analytics and then enable “CTR”, here’s how it looks like: You can even filter by “Pages”:… and that will allow you to compare the different click-through rates for your most popular pages. If you spot one that’s performing bad (like page3 in the example below), you know you need to improve its SEO title and meta-description:SEO is an overwhelming topic, so I’m regularly trying to break it down into edible pieces. Hope this article has given you a little more clarity. FOREGROUNDWEBImage SEO essentials: How to optimize for Google Image search to drive more traffic to your photography websiteImages are everything for a photography website and, if optimized correctly, can show up high in Google Images and link back to your own site.That can be a considerable amount of traffic that you’d have ignored otherwise.This guide will explore all the relevant SEO best-practices to help you rank high in Google Image search, as well as explain why it’s worth the effort.Why would you want to rank in Google Image search in the first place?First of all, because a third of all Google searches are performed in Google Image Search (source). That is a huge opportunity, a large amount of traffic up for grabs.And it’s not just about ranking your images higher in Google Images. If you rank well in Google Images, your photos also show up in regular Google searches! That’s because Google also has special features (in their regular web search) when it detects you might want to see images (based on the search query).You can have a big box of images to the right of search results:… or just a small row of images above search results: If you use a search query like “pictures of X” or “photos of X” (where the search intent is clear), you might even see an “Image Mega-block”:These are just a few of Google’s SERP features. Apparently, 12.5% of all web searches on Google actually contain an image pack. That’s huge traffic! And that’s good news for photographers like yourself: that traffic is already primed to look for images.Yeah, but is it worth the effort? Do people actually land on your site from Google Images?Let’s deconstruct this: the main concern is whether showing up in Google Image search results actually drives traffic to your site. When you click on a thumbnail, Google first opens up a full size version of that image, with a button to access the actual web page it’s coming from:It’s true that many people never actually visit the websites, they just do a bunch of search and access the images from there. And that’s not useful to you as a website owner, you get absolutely no data on that.That being said, image search SEO is still incredibly useful if… • you sell image licenses (RM or RF, stock photography) • you sell photo-based products (calendars, photo books, agendas, etc.) • you do event photographyIn all of these cases, many people will indeed click to visit the website for the images they like in Google image search results.And most importantly, all these SEO actions will help you rank higher in Google web searches as well! They are not restricted to Google Images, they will help your site altogether. Without image SEO, Google will have a harder time understanding your siteHow this differs from regular SEOAs you probably already know from my in-depth SEO guide, general web-search SEO can be broken down into “on-site” and “off-site”.With image search SEO, there’s more of a focus on “on-site” ranking elements, which is great news for you, because you can actually implement all these details on your site. Google cares more about relevancy (to the user’s image search query), and less on authority (and the number of back-links your site has).In plain terms: you can outrank popular sites (in Google image search) if you do your image SEO right. By the way: in Google Images there is not “first page”, it’s a endless page that automatically adds more image results as you scroll down (usually called “infinite scroll”). So your goal is to help your images rank as high as possible.Don’t forget that quality still matters. If you have poor images, you can’t really outrank other good images. Google still looks at image popularity, it tracks which thumbnails are more often clicked on in image search results. But generally speaking, engagement and off- site SEO are less-important signals for Google Images, the playing field is more level.So… let’s get practical: Image SEO guidelines for ranking in Google Image searchHere are the ranking signals for Google Images (and the image packs in Google web searches): 1. Descriptive image filenameImage filenames should be short (because all URLs should be short), so just stick to 2-4 words separated by hyphens (no underscores or other special characters!).Take this image for example:Bad image filename example: SGP_7343_ret_V2.jpgBetter filename: active-senior-rowing-river.jpgFilenames are not the place for “keyword stuffing”. Just a few hyphen-separated words to describe the image. More on the topic here: SEO guide – 38. Add keywords in image filenamesHow do you automate this process? If using Lightroom, in the export dialog choose “Custom settings” under File Naming, and choose the IPTC field you want to use (usually “Title” or “Headline”)And then you’ll want to replace all spaces with hyphens in filenames, using a tool like Name Mangler or Renamer (similar tools are available for Windows as well)And the “Media File Renamer” plugin can help you speed things up inside WordPress as well.2. Descriptive image alt tagOriginally used for the visually impaired (accessibility), ALT text is now also used by Google to interpret the contents of the image.ALT tags should be concise (<100 characters) explanations of the image. Use natural language again, not a comma-separate list of keywords. Simply think how you would describe the photo to a visually impaired person. These image attributes are only visible to search engines (or users with screen readers). Here’s how they look like in HTML syntax:3. Detailed image caption (visible on the page)Captions usually site right below the image (it can stay on the side as well, but it needs to be close to the image). Sometimes this can have more weight than the actual ALT tag.Don’t forget they are really helpful to human visitors: captions describe an image, they add context, making the image more meaningful for the user. Image SEO should just be a side-benefit of writing captions for humans.4. Relevant copy close the imageSpeaking of stuff in proximity to the image, any text content that you have on the page is relevant to Google.Text right above or below the image provides useful context for your image.And if you can display actual image IPTC data, even better: SEO guide – 39. Display image IPTC metadata Google’s own webmaster guidelines explain it further:“The page the image is on, and the content around the image (including any captions or image titles), provide search engines with important information about the subject matter of your image. For example, if you have a picture of a polar bear on a page about home- grown tomatoes, you’ll be sending a confused message to the search engines about the subject matter of polarbear.jpg.”More on this topic here: SEO tips: 22. Add niche keywords in your website copy5. Keyword-rich page titleEach page on your site should have a H1 heading describing what the page is all about. For image pages, that heading can actually contain the image title (or info stored in the IPTC Heading tag), to further clarity the image contents to Google.6. SEO-friendly page URLThe individual image pages should also have keyword-rick URLs (or “slugs”): www.domain.com/gallery-title-here/image-title-here/Snippet from my in-depth SEO guide for photographers:“If you’re using PhotoShelter or other image management platforms, everything’s already taken care of: the URL actually contains SEO-valuable info taken from the image’s IPTC info, so Google has something more to “chew”, which is great.” 7. Regular image aspect ratiosGoogle tends to prefer the common aspect ratios (3:2, 4:3, 16:9, square), both horizontal and vertical. Panoramas are said to be harder to rank for.8. Medium image dimensionsHarder to optimize small images (<500px), Google doesn’t favor those of course. (There are exceptions).Larger images (>2500px) should be OK. In fact. Google has the tools to filter by image dimensions:9. Decent file sizeOf course Google wants to prioritize high-quality images, but not at the expense of user experience. So you need to make a compromise between aesthetics and performance. And don’t forget about mobile-friendliness, your images need to load quickly on small devices, Google cares about that. The file format and the compression level are critical factors here, so be sure to read How to resize, export & compress images for optimal website performance10. Descriptive anchor textsWhen you’re linking internally to some of your own images, be sure to use detailed and relevant link text.For example, when writing a blog post about your recent wedding shoot, don’t just write: “View images from the wedding reception here“. Instead, say something like: “View images from the wedding reception.”None of the words were changed, just what’s included in the actual link. Google will understand that the destination is about a “wedding reception” and not about… “here”.Other image SEO considerations a) Individual image pagesMost of these tips apply to individual image pages on your site. It’s hard to optimize an entire gallery/portfolio page, because it usually contains a ton of thumbnails with a lot of different pieces of info in there, so Google has a hard time determining relevancy.But on an individual image page, it’s a whole different story. You can use the same keywords in multiple places (filename, ALT tag, captions, page titles, etc.) to insistingly tell Google what the image is all about. b) EXIF dataIt’s not yet clear if Google users image EXIF data in their algorythm. Here’s what Matt Cutts from Google had to say on the topic: Does Google use EXIF data from pictures as a ranking factor?So it’s possible that Google might incorporate more EXIF data in the future, allowing people to filter by camera models, focal lengths, etc., or for determining the original source of an image.Furthermore, if you have a GPS-enabled camera that store geo-coordinates in EXIF data (or if you manually geotagging your images later), that’s great; Google might use that info to identify image locations and provide even more relevant results to its users, though it’s unclear if they do read geo-data and how big of a factor this is at the moment. c) Watermarks don’t matterGoogle’s webmaster guidelines state:“[…] Some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won’t impact your image’s performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image’s thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results.” d) Unique metadataIf you copy-paste keywords/phrases for multiple images, they’ll matter less in Google’s eyes. As with regular web searches, Google wants to show unique images that are relevant with the user’s query. As far as Google is concerned, having duplicate content in search results hurts the user experience. Similarly, showing the same photo multiple times is similarly bad, and Google tried to avoid that. e) Time and effortWorking on all this image SEO is not easy. Do it manually a few times, and then try to work out a routine for whenever you add more images to the site. Try to cover as many of the image SEO factors above as possible. f) All other traditional SEO factors matterThe over-all domain and page SEO still matters of course, you can’t skip that. Be sure to optimize your entire site’s SEO using this comprehensive guide: The complete SEO guide for photographers: 50 tips to maximize your Google rankings & get found onlineNow do the work. Take the time to optimize the existing images on your site.Working on this type of SEO requires an image-by-image process. If you’re automating it (by repeating the same captions and ALT tags), you’re doing it wrong. Each image deserves its own unique metadata, and Google will “appreciate” that.It’s partly the work of writing all the metadata, and partly the technical work of entering all that data into the site. In WordPress, you can of course add parts of the info directly in the site, by just editing the images in your Media LibraryTo update image filenames, use the Media File Renamer plugin.And don’t forget about file sizes. Even if you added great metadata, the image should not slow down the page too much (poor performance undermines any other SEO efforts).So if you need to replace and existing image (by uploading a new one it its place – with a lower file size, new <a href="/tags/Pixel_(1st_generation)/" rel="tag">pixel</a> dimensions, etc.), use the Enable Media Replace plugin.After doing all the basic image SEO, you can take it one step further with keyword researchProbably the best tool for the job is MOZ’s Keyword ExplorerLet’s take this sample Google web search:Now let’s perform the same search in Keyword Explorer and go to “SERP Analysis”: You can immediately see the stats for the 12 images from the “image mega-pack”.Then, if you head over to their “Keyword Suggestions” tab, you’ll get inspiration for your metadata (ALT tags, captions, etc.)And you’ll generally get a sense of the traffic volume, which will help guide you what images to publish on your site next.If you spend even more time doing this type of keyword research, you can even find out good photo opportunities: you’ll know what personal photo projects to focus on nest.At the very least, do an “image SEO audit” of your existing site. Most importantly, see how you can improve your individual image pages, by including as many of the ranking signals I listed above. Submit an image sitemap to GoogleOnce your optimized your site, don’t forget you can send Google a special XML sitemap containing the location of all your site images. This can sometimes speed up the indexing process and give you better changes to rank higher in Google Images. It can also help Google identify images that would otherwise not be crawled (like images loaded dynamically by Javascript code).Learn about image sitemaps and, if using WordPress, install a plugin like “Advanced Image Sitemap” or “Udinra All Image Sitemap” to help you generate the sitemap. Then submit it to Google Search Console (under Crawl > Sitemaps). But if you’re already using the Yoast SEO plugin (which you should!), you’re all good, it’s already including images in your sitemap.If you’re not using WordPress, there are tools out there that can crawl your site and generate the sitemap: Screaming Frog or DYNO Mapper.How to track your resultsA great free tool to track your progress is Google Search Console: Head over to the Search Traffic > Search Analytics report and then set the “Search Type” to be “Image”.This will give you a great overview of your results, allowing you to also drill down by using their other files (filtering by pages, viewing the queries you’re ranking for, filtering by country or device etc.)What about Google Analytics? Well… you can’t really use it to track traffic from Google Images (as most of it is marked under “google/organic”)Further reading• How to Rank in Google Image Search – Whiteboard Friday (Moz) • Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines (Yoast) • How to Perform an Image Optimization Audit (Moz) • Image publishing guidelines (Google Search Console help) • How to Rank First on Google Images • 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips • Optimizing Images in WordPress for Google Image Search Conclusion + what the future brings for Google Image searchThis has been a dense and detailed guide on image SEO. As with regular website SEO, it does take some work, for sure. But it’s a traffic source that’s often neglected by photographers.Make no mistake, image recognition is just around the corner. Google will soon start “understanding” images, and also using that to help rank images properly (if they haven’t already started doing that).You can actually test Google’s Cloud Vision API, just trag an image to the “Try the API” section to see how well it detects objects and faces in images.Facebook is not far behind either, reports says it’s already creating image captions automatically.We can expect major breakthroughs in this field in the years to come. Until then, Google relies on you to make sense of your photos. If you do, it will reward you with more traffic.So don’t underestimate the power of Google Image search. FOREGROUNDWEBThe photographer’s mini- guide to backlinks: how to create, gain & track links back to your siteFirst of all, a few introductory words about link-building.The big picture idea is that SEO is broken down into: • On-site SEO (thinks you can control on your own site, like page titles and meta- descriptions, page copy, image captions and keywords, site performance etc.) • Off-site SEO (factors outside of your website)While photographers often hustle to improve their on-site SEO, they ignore the external factors that Google takes into consideration, wondering why they’re still not ranking well.The bread-and-butter of SEO is getting links back to your site. Search engines consider links from other sites to yours as “votes of confidence”, and use them to rank your website higher. They take into account: • The number of sites linking to yours • The relevance of those links (as it relates to the user’s search query) • The authority of those other sites. If you get a link from <a href="/tags/The_New_York_Times/" rel="tag">The New York Times</a> (lucky you!), it’s worth more than a link from a friend’s Facebook post. It makes sense. Question from a more advanced user: Do anchor texts matter too?Very little, it’s not like it used to be. Google is very smart about it these days, and can analyze the text around the link to determine if a link is relevant and to figure out what topics to rank your site for.Before we continue, it’s also worth mentioning that “link-building” is highly important, but it’s not the only factor. In fact, there are many other aspects Google takes into consideration when ranking your website, which I’ve covered in more detail in the full SEO guide (at the beginning of this PDF).You might already know that creating quality content (image galleries, blog posts, products) is what Google values more and more, along with the experience that users have on your site. But having links points back to your site from respectable places is highly important.Backlinks can be broken down into different categories: 1. Links you can controlIt makes sense to start with any photography-specific profiles pages you can control (in order to add a link back to your site).Think of all the sites you have profiles on: • social media websites • associations • memberships • contests you took part in • vendor/supplier sites • trade groups • forums • communities • event sites you’ve shot for • sites you’ve written guest posts forBasically, anywhere your name/brand shows up online and where you can add a bio or at least a link.2. Links you can buy (but shouldn’t)Just don’t do it.It’s one thing to buy Facebook or Twitter ads for your website (to get people to visit your site or purchase a photo product or service you offer), it’s another to buy shady SEO services that generate “fake” links to your site. Google will take notice and won’t be happy about it! 3. Links you can “gain” over time a) Testimonials for clients. If you work with clients directly (portraits, weddings, events), ask them for a testimonial on their own blog (with a link). The link is obviously important there, so Google can consider it an “endorsement”. b) Organic links. Putting quality content on your site will make people share it with their friends. They might even write about your site on their own blogs. You don’t get there by asking for links, buying them or doing “link exchanges”. You get there by consistently creating interesting and useful content that people can draw inspiration from.4. Links you get but don’t wantSometimes, spam sites link to random sites out there to get your attention or hurt your site’s SEO.If you check your site in MOZ’s Open Site Explorer you’ll see that each referring site has a “spam score”. Getting links from such sites can look bad in Google’s eyes, so it’s best to try to remove those links: 1. Contact those respective sites to remove unneeded links, or remove them yourself if they come from your own profile pages. 2. Use Google’s Disavow tool (part of Google Search Console) to make Google ignore such spammy/artificial links. An in-depth guide for it here. Track inbound linksIf you don’t know what sites are already linking to your own, or want to keep track of your link-building efforts, it’s good to know where you stand.Here are the best tools you can use to track links back to your site: • Google Search Console (formerly named Google Webmaster Tools). Navigate to Search Traffic > Links to Your Site. • MOZ Open Site Explorer • ahrefs • Majestic • MonitorBacklinks • LinkodyRead more about link-building • Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Chapter 7: Growing Popularity & Links (Moz) • What are Backlinks? (PDN online) • The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever (PointBlankSEO) • 19+1 Ways To Cleverly Get Natural Backlinks To Your Blog (BloggerTipsTricks) • 59 Amazing Organic Link Building Articles (CognitiveSEO) FOREGROUNDWEBSEO is no longer a game you can “win” with tags & keywordsRegarding SEO, you have to look at a broader picture. Google cares more instead about user satisfaction.No longer can you just craft perfect SEO titles & meta-descriptions, or cram specific keywords into any piece of content on your site, and except to rank higher overnight.Google is instead protecting its users by closely analyzing how they browse your website.Allow me to exaggerate for effect:You followed various SEO best-practices and placed your target keyword/phrase into your page titles, SEO titles and meta-descriptions, H1 & H2 tags, image ALT tags, and various other places throughout the site.You’re bound to rank on the 1st page in Google for those specific terms, right? But then some visitors reach your site and… • they wait a few seconds extra for the pages to load • something about the design doesn’t feel right • they’re overwhelmed by the confusing navigation • they can’t (easily) find the content they came looking for • they’re sometimes “greeted” with a site functionality problem or a broken linkSo they leave…And Google takes notice: “This website is probably not relevant or good enough, let’s rank it lower.”So get back to basics: think about how to create a good experience for users on your site. And write your SEO tags for humans, not for Google. FOREGROUNDWEB20 quick tips to reduce your bounce rate and keep visitors on your site longerWhen a user lands on your website, Google notices if they bounce back to search results, or instead they start browsing through your site.PhotoShelter’s SEO Guide for Photographers provides a good definition:Google defines a “bounce” as a visitor who looks at the first page of your site and does not click to any other pages (i.e., exits after seeing that one page and presumably deciding your site’s content does not match their search interests.) Your bounce rate for search traffic should go down if your search terms are effectively driving relevant traffic. In terms of targeting an optimal bounce rate, […] it is widely quoted that an average bounce rate across all websites is 40%, and from our experience with a lot of photographer websites, anything under 50% or so and you are probably doing OK.But bounce rate can vary depending on the type of photography and the type of traffic you’re generating. For example, celebrity/red carpet photography sites tend to have relatively high search engine-based traffic, but it’s not necessarily qualified buyers who are seeking it. […] A high bounce rate, in this case, isn’t indicative of bad content – it’s merely a symptom of having popular content with a broad (consumer) audience. While I’ve briefly mentioned bounce rates in my own SEO guide (as action #32), I wanted to list all the tips you can use to improve your visitors’ browsing experience (and, in turn, your site’s bounce rate):1. Have a clean design. A minimalist design/layout is more pleasing on the eyes, whereas a cluttered layout pushes people away. Many times you use a site more just because it’s designed better and the user-experience is great.2. Don’t overwhelm visitors with too many navigation options. The number of menu items should ideally be kept to 5-7.3. Place the navigation in a consistent location. Avoid confusion by having the navigation in the same spot throughout your site, including your blog area.4. Add clear call-to-action buttons at the end of pages. Ask yourself where visitors should browse next.5. Provide fewer browsing options on the homepage. This is all about optimizing your homepage for first-time visitors: you can’t effectively promote 30 featured galleries at the same time. Less is more. 6. Pay attention to text length and formatting. Long paragraphs/blocks of text are boring to read (this is not prose or journalism), so you should either write in shorter sentences or at least use text formatting to make it easy to skim through: sub- headings, bold, italics, bullet points.7. Improve your page headlines. They almost always get read, so they’re critical in raising interest and making people read the rest of the page.8. Use good colors. Background colors that are easy on the eyes, font colors that contrast well with the background to make the text readable.9. No splash pages. Google “sees” that visitors get to a site and then immediately click away from the first page or leave the site altogether.10. No auto-playing music. An insight into my own browsing habits: I immediately close 90% of all sites that start playing background music automatically. Why do they assume I’m not listening to music at the same time?11. Check the site for broken links or functionality. Once something doesn’t work, visitors are much more inclined to leave the site, their trust has been broken. Use broken link checker tools to scan your site and have some friends/family browse your entire site from head to bottom (like a user testing team) and gather feedback.12. Make your website fast. To prevent people from leaving in frustration, invest some time into speeding up your site. (read more)13. Make your site mobile-friendly. Highly important. I’ve already touched on this in previous articles here and here). 14. Write useful & relevant meta-descriptions for search engine users. If users understand what your site is about right from Google’s search results, they already know what to expect when they reach your site, so they’re more inclined to stay and explore your content.15. Make the search box easy to find, if people need to be able to search for images on your site. Especially important if you have a big archive of stock images.16. Make external links open in new windows/tabs, so people stay or come back to your site easily. Use this plugin if using WordPress. 17. Update any outdated content on your site. Outdated contact info, old projects you’re still featuring on the homepage, inactive blog pages etc.18. At the end of blog posts, show related posts. It keeps people on the site longer, reading more. Some good WordPress plugins for that here.19. Make sure your site’s 404 pages are useful. When visitors get to your site on an invalid/missing page, they see a 404 page. Most of the times, you can customize that page to lead people to the main areas in your site. Google recommends this too.20. Most importantly, provide quality content. Don’t lose sight of this. All the tips & tricks in the world will not help your site if your content is mediocre.Hope you found these tips useful. Which of them can you work on today to improve your photo website? FOREGROUNDWEBForegroundWeb Q&ASEO-RELATED SNIPPETS FROM THE Q&A SERIES“Adding text to the homepage helps SEO, but what if you’re using a fullscreen homepage (slideshow)? They have great impact visually, but would you recommend them & how can they be improved for SEO?”First of all, I’d really assess if the fullscreen homepage is really worth it. It’s obviously a game of compromises: you’re trading usability for visual impact.Some of the times that’s not really needed, and you can “get away” with just a strong slideshow or static image, while still having content below that (text and links that act as portals to other sections in your site). To make this decision, you need to get an understanding of who your target audience is, and what browsing preferences they have. And probably the best recommendation I can give you (if you have some technical knowledge or a developer to help you) is to test things out: do an A/B test and compare the results in Google Analytics. Don’t just assume a version of the page is better, get proof. But let’s say you’re still keen on having a fullscreen homepage. This web-design practice is popular with wedding photography websites, or with general portfolio- type websites (where the main focus is on impressing with images, and not on selling or blogging).In this case, you have to commit to your decision of not having text on the homepage, and stick to the tools you do have to “tame” SEO: • Make sure your SEO title and meta description for the homepage are perfect • Have a clean & clear navigation menu so visitors can find it easy to jump to other pages without any confusion • Work on the site’s performance (which in turn affects bounce rates and SEO) • Compensate for the lack of text on the other pages: make sure you’re properly describing what your site is all about in the About page, gallery descriptions, etc.And finally, don’t worry about it too much. Google is smart about it, ranking happens for the entire site as a whole. So if you’re doing a good job with SEO on the other pages (and also off-site), your website will still come up higher in search results, even without text on the homepage.What I don’t recommend is having hidden text in the homepage source code (just for SEO purposes). Once again Google is smart about it :-) “Are there 200 SEO things to get right on your site or is that just sales talk?”Full Question: I want a site that will perform 100% in <a href="/tags/Google/" rel="tag">Googles</a> eyes. I do not want to simply put a cosmetic face on an existing site that has too many SEO errors. I am interested why theses two sites are on the first page of google for the search term Wedding Photography Perth. So once the website is updated can you then help me to also have everything strong with SEO? The lady above said that there were 200 SEO things to get right in your website for it to be really strong. Is that the case or sales talk?In terms of SEO, there are two kinds of work: on-site and off-site SEO. The on-site work tries to bring the website itself to a perfect state, so Google properly indexes the site and attributes value to its rankings.Off-site is usually the more long-term strategy that you are responsible for, and usually involved trying to get other sites to link back to your site. So it is important to keep in mind that visits to your site and Google search positions aren’t going to show dramatic changes unless some of your efforts are placed on marketing too. Without that, it is unlikely the site will go straight to the first page of result, and see lots of traffic/sales straight away.So again, with on-site SEO, when someone does a Google search for your specific type of photographer or service, providing your type of photography matches, you might come up on the first page of search results. This is something all these meta tags and changes are useful for, but it does involve you putting in some good off-site SEO work as well.The main thing you will want to pay attention to when it comes to driving traffic to your site is backlinks (= links back to your website) and the “anchor text” (the linked text). If you haven’t embarked on a strategy to create backlinks (e.g. blogging more about your website, getting other people to blog about you, etc), then you won’t have much success with search engines, and therefore, you won’t have many visitors.You should think of each link as an endorsement of your content. The more links, the more likely the search engines are likely to consider you a credible search result.That’s where those competitors you mentioned are probably also doing right, they gathered a lot of backlinks over time to help then rank higher. So this is an important mindset shift: you can work on optimizing everything in the site’s back end, but this is only on-site optimization, it’s only part of the equation.Even with on-site things absolutely perfect, you’re still not guaranteed to rank above those competitors, because Google is looking at other factors as well: • backlinks, like I mentioned • site performance (if a site is slow, Google doesn’t want to serve it in results as often) • whether the site is mobile-friendly • content quality (if Google notices that people reach a page on your site and then quickly leave/bounce, it thinks the content is not good enough and therefore ranks the site lower)So besides all the SEO work, you still need to promote the site externally (to get links from other sites), to continually work on quality content (so people find it useful/ enticing and consume more of it), and to wait – because time is also a reason those competitors rank high, you can’t just overtake them in a week of intense SEO :-)Hope this helps give you more clarity about everything. “Does it help SEO to leave blog comments on popular photography blogs?”Extra Question: Also does it help being active and engaging on popular photography blogs making comments & leaving your website details in the correct fields? Does this help SEO?Let’s break this down into 2 separate things:SEO: probably zero effect. Links in blog comments have been so overused in past years, that Google is likely ignoring them. Furthermore, some commenting systems using Javascript to load comments, something that Google can’t read yet anyway most commenting systems automatically place a “no-follow” tag to those links, so Google doesn’t pass any SEO value anyway.Humans: depending on the site where you do post comments, you might get some people clicking that link and visiting your site. Usually, this traffic-getting technique works very slowly, and is not a good investment for your site, so I’d say don’t bother with it. Just write comments where you feel you can add something to the conversation and be helpful, instead of doing it to post a link back to your site.“Does it matter where the website is hosted?”The location of the hosting server pays no importance on SEO, no worries, Google probably doesn’t care about that.The only possible influence it could have on SEO is indirectly, through the speed of the site. If your target visitors are from the UK, then it’s good that the hosting is also in Europe (doesn’t have to be in the UK specifically). “Should I change my domain name to include ‘photography’ in it?”Full Question: “Currently I have xyz.com (anonymized) but maybe having xyzphotography. com is better and far more fruitful. I mean that’s not just the only thing, but this does help start the Google juice building a lot more, right?”I don’t recommend changing the domain name.When you’re just starting out, and looking for your first domain name, sure, it’s ideal to choose one with keywords in it. But in your case, it’s not worth the change.Changing a domain name for an existing site, even if you do everything right (with 301 redirects) can still have an SEO impact, you’ll loose some of that SEO juice for a while, it’s not worth it. It’s such a small SEO factor (out of hundreds of others), that you’re better off investing your time and energy into other things (like creating more quality content for your audience)“Is it bad SEO to have all your images first on a blog post before all your blog copy?”Follow-up notes: “Since images are most important thing on a photographers website I would like to have images first then copy but don’t want it to hurt SEO.”My initial reaction is that most photographers have got SEO all wrong.Sure, having text higher up on a page/post is slightly better for SEO, but it’s one out of hundreds of SEO factors, so it doesn’t really matter. What matters more are humans, not search engines. Is it better for human visitors to get some text at the top of the post (for providing context, telling a story)? If yes, then do that. That should be your decision, and not what’s better for SEO.If it’s more helpful to visitors, they will spend more time on your site and/or browse more of your posts, which in turn “tells” Google that your site is worth it => better SEO. Google pays attention to how people experience your site. So focus on people.“How can I get more keyword ideas?”Here are some tools you can use to get keyword ideas (variations of your target ones, when writing any sort of copy on your site) or to get traffic estimates for them (so you know what to prioritize).I’ve highlighted some good ideas that came up when using “iceland photo tour” as a reference point. You definitely don’t have to use all of them, just test them out to find the one(s) you’re comfortable with (because you’ll probably be using them again in the future).1 a). First of all, use Google and look at related searches at the bottom of the results: 1 b) Another search you can do is: intitle:”iceland photo tour” to see what other people have in their page titles besides the main phrase.2. Use Buzzsumo to get a list of the most shared pieces of content around a phrase. You’ll get some good ideas for what variations other people have used: 3. KWFinder is great, it gives you many suggestions along with their estimated search volume: 4. Moz > Keyword Explorer.5. Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool This one is completely free and has no limits.6. UberSuggest7. KeywordTool.io “Are galleries and slideshows SEO-friendly?”This is a complex question. Anything is SEO friendly if it contains text (and not just images) AND is easily index-able and understandable by Google.If gallery thumbs or slideshow images have ALT tags (in the source code, not visible by humans), excellent. If you also show text on the site (thumbnail titles/captions, slideshow image titles etc.), even better.But it also depends on how well-coded your WP theme and/or plugins are. FOREGROUNDWEBIn-depth (white-hat) SEO review ($550)The complete SEO review for new or existing photography websites.I’ll highlight everything you’re doing wrong now, fix any critical SEO issues and give you recommendations for improving your rankings and befriending Google.Good SEO might be the reason you’re now on this website, but it requires a whole lot of technical stuff that you probably don’t want to deal with. I know many photographers tell me that.All photographers are fighting for attention online. Those with the resources and knowledge to improve their photo website’s rankings will eventually reap the benefits of the increased traffic & exposure.The SEO review/audit costs $550 USD. Flat fee, no hidden costs. My work is usually completed within 10 days from starting, and we then schedule the free consulting call at your convenience. SEO reviews are currently booked at least a few weeks in advance, so act now if you’d like to schedule yoursGet many other free resources in the ForegroundWeb Member Area. 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