ATL Photographers

Photography is the easy part, at least for me. Search engine optimization and getting my artwork in front of potential clients…well, that’s another story all together. Since the dawn of the Internet search, man has been on a mission to trick it, twist it, and tweak it for purposes of good and evil. Most wanted to push the ranks of their websites into the tops of results pages, but some wanted (and still want) to exploit them for unethical ways to make money. I’ll talk about business ethics in  a future article, but for now let’s touch on the basics of why search engine optimization, or SEO, is so important to your photography business and how the real “evil-doers” have made it harder for us over the years (and “No”, I’m not a Bush fan).

SEO is a term that covers any action or reaction that is culminated as a direct effort to raise your ranks in search engines like yahoo and google.

I probably shouldn’t be sharing all of these tips with my competitors, but I am certainly a capitalist and believe that only through healthy competition can products, services, business, and people grow faster, better, and stronger. It’s no surprise that in a digital age you will lose your competitive edge very quickly if you do not adapt to new standards. Assuming your work is good, and people hang around your site to look through galleries, optimizing your business online will serve you better than any single ad campaign you could likely afford. It will push new business to you, give you greater exposure, and make you look to the innocent like you have been on top of the game in your market for years. The downside - SEO is a science that people spend years trying to master and yet no one can ever fully understand it. The reason for this is because of the complexity and ever-changing nature of advanced algorithms and countless developers streamlining the processes. “Bots” are the beasts that scour world-wide web using these algorithms to decide what pages are good, what pages are bad, what ones are scams, and what ones hold real value to the reader.

Now let’s touch on some of the major points you should consider when optimizing your website. These aren’t secrets, but they are known to be amongst the most important factors in ranking your site.

#1 -Relevant Content

You’ll read many places that keywords and meta tags aren’t important anymore, and sure, if you’re myspace or FedEx they probably aren’t simply because the traffic to your site is proof enough that your URL is relevant to the search terms typed into any given search engine. If we take a look at 2 scenarios you’ll see why including and updating them is important:

Your wedding photography website is crawled or indexed by google and the first major thing it sees on it’s search through your code is meta data and here’s what it records on your index page(we’ll keep it simple for now):

a. <title>Photography</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”We take great pictures for you.”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”photography, pictures, photos, videos”/>
<META NAME=”author” CONTENT=”me”>

b. <title>Bella Sorrisa Photography Atlanta, GA</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Bella Sorrisa Photography is a premier local and destination wedding, on-location portrait, and architectural  photography company in Atlanta, GA. Lead photographer Joshua Camp has made Bellasorrisa.com your best resource for all of your photographic needs.”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Atlphotographers, Atlanta wedding photography, Engagement photos”/>
<META NAME=”author” CONTENT=”Joshua Camp”>

Now comes the fun part…analyzing what these tags REALLY mean. It doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that in the first example not much useful information is divulged. While it’s tempting to throw in only major keywords into your title, description, and keywords, it essentially tells a search engine that you are trying to be like 336,000,000 other sites that it ranks for the word “photography”. Guess who gets the ranking…a combination of the sites with the most USABILITY (see ease of use), the best use of LANGUAGE, and the site with the highest CONTENT VALUE (see readership, relevant link-backs, and rate of reader return). Congratulations, you are knocked out of the running and will probably never be seen unless your site seriously excels at one of the other points. You’ll also notice that in the first example that the “description” field is rather short. You’ll be pretty heavily penalized for that because search engines like their users to know what is actually on the page BEFORE they click the link. This makes their job that much more effective.

There are other problems with these tags, but I’ll have to cover that in a future article.

Keep checking back and we’ll be looking at some other points and relate them to our #1 important factor. The coming articles are:

#2 -Usability

#4 -Language

#5 -Content Value

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joshua Camp is the owner of Caffeine and Cream, ATL Photographers and Bella Sorrisa Photography in Atlanta and specializes in a range of wedding, assignment, destination and abstract photography. His team is available for shoots at very reasonable prices andcan be contacted for quotes by visiting The Website of Bella Sorrisa Photography and filling out the Contact Us Form.