Table of Contents Planning & Competitive Assessment PAGE 8
On-page factors PAGE 13
Building backlinks PAGE 23
RESOURCES PAGE 37
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Overview You probably used a search engine this week. Maybe you searched for a camera, or a restaurant, or a Do-It-Yourself video on how to power wash your deck. You might have searched from your phone, iPad or laptop. No matter the search, your experience was the same: you searched, found a set of results, clicked on one of the top results, and were on your way. In the information society, search engines are the connective tissue that binds query to content. The websites that appear on the first page of results for nearly any search aren’t there by chance. In most cases, the website owner worked on their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure that they occupied a top position, and the reason is simple. Empirically, we know that 60-80% of the click traffic goes to the top three search results. And behaviorally, people are more likely to refine a search than to go to page 2 if they don’t find what they’re looking for. In other words, having good SEO directly translates into more visitors to your site, which in turn can mean more business. SEO is a technique that helps your website rank higher in searches on Google and other major search engines. The better your ranking for specific keywords, the more likely you are to drive traffic to your website, which leads to more potential new business. This guide is designed to familiarize you with the inner workings of search engines and give you a systematic approach to improving your SEO. Although the major search engines have had numerous modifications to their ranking algorithms since we first released this guide in 2009, much of the fundamentals that govern SEO success have remained unchanged. And since SEO is a long term play, it’s important to get started as soon as possible. photoshelter.com
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Why Bother?
Search engines are helpful to you and me, but they continue to evolve because they make lots of money for companies like Google. Simply stated, they provide page inventory against which ads can be placed. As sophisticated as Google’s machinations were in the late 90s, it was only once they figured out that they should be pairing ads of shoes when someone searched for shoes that they became the juggernaut of the web. But if you remember the early days of the Internet in the mid 90s, search engines are a fickle thing. Without a constant evolution, and without the ability to provide results that meet the expectation of the searcher, search engines fall out of favor with users. Who can remember AltaVista, Dogpile, or even Yahoo!’s search engines? Meeting the expectation of the user necessarily means that constant refinements need to be made to search. Google used to only provide text results, but now their universal search incorporates images, video, news and more. It’s all an effort to placate the searcher so that they don’t go to another search engine, which would significantly impact Google’s revenue. So instead of thinking of SEO as a game created by a maniacal clock maker, consider the realities of how doubling (or halving) your website traffic would impact your business and livelihood. There is no doubt that the changing algorithms are frustrating, but it’s the price we pay for constant innovation.
The Psychology of Search
Although a mathematical formula governs which web pages appear in any given search result, a user’s propensity to click on a result is purely a psychological response. Have you ever searched for something, scanned all 10 results on the page, and not clicked on anything? What leads you to not click on anything? Your eyes scan the list of results looking for keywords and phrases that match your expectation. When you don’t find any, you are likely to refine your search. This is why it’s critically important to have good page titles and meta descriptions on each page of your website. Not only are they strong SEO signals, but they increase the probability that a user will click on your website.
Search Intent
Search intent is an interesting concept that might alter the way you think about which keywords to optimize. When someone searches for “best tv,” their intent is probably research, but when someone searches for “best tv sale,” they are probably much closer to a buying decision. Now let’s think about this in the context of photography. Consider the following search terms:
• “empire state building photo” • “empire state building print for sale”
You can start to see how “intent” plays a huge role in search, and why your SEO strategy should include a variety of terms that target different intents and different parts of the sales cycle. Your website visitors are not a homogeneous group, and you’ll improve your chances of converting visitors into paying customers by being attuned to their needs at different points.
“best TV” increasing buying intent “Sony LED TV”
“Sony XBR 55” price”
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What Isn’t SEO
Searching for your own name and finding your website isn’t SEO. Even though “brand” terms (e.g. your name or your company’s name) might be a non-trivial percentage of your overall traffic, the real goal is to drive unsolicited traffic. You want people to find you by searching for your products and services, and not solely your name.
How Fast Can I Expect Results?
We’ve seen significant changes reflected in a few weeks, but most SEO experts agree that stabilization of SEO rankings occurs after about 3 months from when the time a change has been made. Still, given that most pages and websites are not optimized, you might be surprised how quickly your website will start to rank for the more niche terms you’re targeting.
Google Search, plus Your World
In early January 2012, Google rolled out a search enhancement that mixed “straight” SEO-based results with more personalized results. The feature, called “Search, plus Your World,” was developed to try to use the people you know (as identified by your Google+ social network and web browsing history) as a way to improve search results. Early results are mixed, with some users complaining that relevancy is jeopardized by the “noise” of personalized results (note that the number of results per page remains at 10 by default, so organically ranking results get pushed to page 2 and beyond when personalized results are intermixed). There are also some privacy concerns given that “Search, plus Your World” will feed content that was shared privately with you (like a hidden Picasa gallery) into what appears to be a normal set of search results. Assuming that photo buyers start to use Google+ with increasing frequency, “Search, plus Your World” might offer photographers a way to infiltrate universal search results. It’s too soon to determine how significantly this new feature will affect generic SEO, and whether a whole new discipline of personalized SEO will start to surface. Keep your eye out for the PhotoShelter Blog for up-to-date information on this dynamically changing horizon.
Understanding Google Basics
When you go to google.com, you are executing a “universal search.” The resulting search engine result page (SERP) returns a list of webpages matching your query. When you go to images.google.com, you are executing a Google Images search, which returns up to 1,000 thumbnails in an “infinite scroll” (a concept that originated with Bing.com). Two different engineering teams are responsible for these respective search engines, and while there is a lot of overlap in the signals that affect the SEO, success in one doesn’t necessarily equate to success in another.
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For example, we see a very high correlation of filename to SEO success in Google Image search. When you search for “empire state building,” almost all the top results have an image filename that includes those keywords (e.g. empire-statebuilding.jpg). However, this isn’t so much the case with universal search. It’s also important to understand that while more and more people are using Google Images to find photos, it still represents a very small percentage of traffic to photography websites. You can use Google Analytics to see the percentage of traffic coming from Google Images.
Developing a Strategy
There’s no magic to improving your SEO. It takes constant work, but at the same time, we advocate a systematic approach with analytics to tell whether your efforts are worthwhile. You might find that your website traffic does not materially change even with improved SEO – that might be an indication that your target customers simply aren’t using search to find you. Nevertheless, we remain incredibly bullish about the prospect of SEO to increase your business. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of areas that encompass an SEO strategy. Rather than trying to solve all the issues simultaneously, we like a measured approach. Fix your page titles in week 1, your gallery descriptions in week 2, etc.
Setting your Product & Services
You should accept upfront the frustrating fact that there is no guaranteed, clear-cut way to claim the #1 spot. For starters, the search engines like to keep their algorithms mysterious. These are trade secrets that keep them ahead of competition and prevent marketers from gaming the system. And search engines are getting smarter daily – meaning techniques could be outdated the minute you perfect them! So prepare yourself – be patient and relish even the smallest victories. Further, your search engine rankings don’t change overnight. In fact, most of the major search engines have mechanisms to ensure that a newly optimized site doesn’t spring to the top of the results quickly, because those situations are likely fraudulent. Most experts agree that SEO changes take a minimum of 3 months to really take effect. That said, if you’ve never thought about SEO, then employing some strategies might have a quick effect on your rankings. We’ve seen people move from page 10 to page 6 quickly. But as you might expect, getting to the first page of search results for a given keyword gets exponentially harder. And the activities that you need to do to move up to the first page (e.g. building inbound links from other sites) take a lot more effort than adding a few keywords to your pages. But unlike marketing in the pre-Internet era, an individual photographer can now use free analytical tools to understand how to systematically address the marketing challenge presented by SEO. So set aside a few days to think about planning, and then a few months to really employ the SEO techniques that work. SEO is definitely a trial-and-error process, particularly as the search algorithms get refined. Since the full effect of your SEO efforts won’t take hold for a few months, you might as well pace yourself.
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Planning & Competitive Assessment Planning your SEO starts with understanding what keywords and phrases are important to you. In other words, what terms do you want your website to come up for when a potential customer executes a search? It’s impossible to optimize for every keyword. There isn’t enough time in the day, and there is too much competition for specific terms (You’ll never appear on page 1 for “photographer,” but you might for “hawaiian sea life photographer”). The planning phase requires you to think about what keywords and concepts you want associated with your website. It doesn’t pay to be a generalist. And if you shoot stock photography but also shoot weddings, you might consider creating multiple sites. Not only is this better from a user experience perspective (i.e. your stock photo buyers have no interest in your wedding photos and vice versa), it also makes it easier for you to focus your copy on key terms.
The planning phase requires you to think about what keywords and concepts you want associated with your website.
We like to break down the planning and assessment phase into four parts:
1. Keyword hit list
Optimizing your website for specific keywords and phrases shouldn’t be approached willy-nilly. We advocate the creation of a list of top keywords and phrases that you want your website to rank for. This hit list should contain 20-50 words and phrases, and should range from the general to the more specific. You should have a combination of “head terms” (phrases of 3 or fewer keywords) and “long tail terms.” For example, let’s say you’re a wedding photographer in Philadelphia. The following words might appear on your hit list: • philadelphia wedding photographer • philly wedding photographer • wedding photographer in philly • ambler wedding photographer
DO THIS • Generate a list of 20-50 keywords. • Make sure they represent general to specific terms. • Don’t forget colloquial terms.
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• wedding photographers near temple university • cheap wedding photographers in philly • best philadelphia wedding photographer
Using colloquial terms like “philly” and more specific terms like “ambler,” which is a suburb outside of Philly, is likely to drive more traffic to your website.
2. Check keywords with AdWords
When you generate a list of keywords, you’re trying to guess the words that your customers will be searching for. But how do you really know? You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to see approximate search volumes for each term. The Keyword Tool was developed for advertisers who wanted to gauge how much search volume existed for a given term (e.g. plasma tv) before spending money to place an ad.
DO THIS • Check each keyword hit list term with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. • Note the various search volumes for each term. • Pay attention to Google’s suggestions. • Refine your keyword hit list.
We can use the same tool to get a general sense of search volume for a given term. The Tool also gives you suggestions for similar phrases that might generate more search volume. Use the Tool to sanity check your list. For example, you might have “wedding photographer in philly” on your list, but the Tool reveals that “philly wedding photographer” is the higher search volume term. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have “wedding photographer in philly” on your list – after all, SEO isn’t only about winning for specific terms; over time you should dominate for the corpus of terms that is related to your products and services. What the Tool allows us to do is refine your list. You might add a few variations or remove some low search volume terms. You can also get a rough sense of what your theoretical traffic could be if you dominated all your hit list terms. photoshelter.com
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3. Assess the online competition
If you are a youth sports photographer, then you’re probably keenly aware of who your competition is because you probably stand next to them on the sidelines each week. You might be surprised to find that your online competition is a completely different set of people. Search for each term on your hit list in Google, and take note of who is coming up in the top ten results. Are you surprised? There are probably a number of names you’ve never even heard of. But in many ways, these people are the more crucial competition because of the way people search for information.
DO THIS • Google each term on your hit list to familiarize yourself with your online competition.
If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you could monitor your online competition’s rankings over time as well.
4. Backlink analysis
Creating backlinks (links from other websites to your website) is of crucial importance to good SEO. It’s also often a very easy way to understand how competitive your competition really is. In order to understand the feasibility of displacing our online competition, we can use a backlink analysis tool to count how many backlinks a given domain has.
DO THIS • Perform a backlink analysis for the top online competition at MajesticSEO. • Determine whether you can feasibly create more backlinks than the competition in a 6-12 month time frame. • If you cannot, then the competition for that term is too high. Pick terms with lower competitiveness and start improving your SEO!
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The question to ask yourself is whether you can create a larger number of backlinks than the competition in 6-12 months.
For this, we like to use MajesticSEO.com, which is a free backlink analysis tool. From your list of online competition, simply search for their domain on MajesticSEO, and you can see unique backlinks and unique domains. The more backlinks from the more diverse domains it has, the harder it will be to displace. A point of note, there is often a steep drop off in backlinks from position #1 to position #2, and certainly to position #10. So don’t be discouraged if the top search result has 1000 backlinks, because you might find that the #10 result only has 50. Such is the nature of backlink creation. The question to ask yourself at this point is whether you can create a larger number of backlinks than the competition in 6-12 months. If they have 1000 backlinks, it’s probably unlikely, but if they have 50, a concerted effort can clearly help you move ahead in the rankings.
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Technical Factors Affecting SEO
If someone asked you to create a search engine, how would you do it? How would you determine that NASA.gov was a more definitive site for spacerelated topics than NigerianRocketships.com? This is exactly the question that Google and the other major search engines tackled to create their ever-evolving search. By most estimates, there are over 200 “signals” that affect SEO rankings, and these can largely be divided into “on-page” and “off-page” factors. The on-page factors are the ones you can control through your website (assuming your website gives you the ability to modify certain pieces of information). The off-page factors (e.g. backlinks, social media) are much longer term plays, because they often involve getting other people to interact with your website, which means you need a marketing plan.
There are over 200 “signals” that affect SEO rankings, and these can largely be divided into “on-page” and “off-page” factors.
In the next few sections, we will go over specific factors that affect SEO. If your website provider is claiming good SEO, make sure that they are actually affecting as many of these factors as possible, because SEO isn’t comprised of one thing. It’s an amalgamation of many signals that help you create credibility online.
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On-page factors Page title Page title is the piece of text that appears at the top of your browser. How did such a small piece of text become the most important on-page factor? Consider this analogy: If you walked into a bookstore, and none of the books had titles, how would you know what each book was about? It might seem arbitrary to put disproportionate weight on the page title, but it makes sense given the context. Because page title is so important, you want to have unique page titles on every page of your website. Too often we see a photographer’s name on each page (e.g. “Joe Smith Photography”). Google hates to see this repetition, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by having the same title. Instead, each image should have a sentence describing the image. The homepage should indicate the types of products and services you provide. Also note that there is a strong correlation between the order of keywords and SEO success, so you’ll want to put your most important terms up front. For example:
Consider this analogy: If you walked into a bookstore, and none of the books had titles, how would you know what each book was about?
Bad: Joe Smith Photography | Serving the OC for 20 years Good: Orange Country Commercial Photographer | Joe Smith Photography Google recommends page titles of 70 characters. This doesn’t mean you’ll be penalized if you go over. The limit exists because search engines use the page title as the anchor text in search results.
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DO THIS • Ensure that you have unique page titles on each page. • Put the most important terms at the beginning. • Aim for 70 characters for each page title.
The page title of this website is “The Best Music Photography & Band Portraits – Todd Owyoung”.
DOn’t do THIS • Put your name at the front of the page title. • Use the same title on every page of your site. This can negatively affect your SEO.
We can see the page title is rendering in the HTML code of this website.
The page title is crucially important from a psychological standpoint. If a user types in “underwater stock photography” and your search result says, “Lee Wedding Photos,” the searcher is unlikely to click on your website.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP
Header tags
• Photoshelter automatically sets your page titles using data like gallery names to generate unique titles.
In HTML, the header tag exists to make type bigger and bolder. Here’s an example of some HTML markup: <h1>Shake</h1> And this is what it looks like in a browser.
• Automatically appends your site name at the end of the title. • Automatically appends “ – Images” to the names of your galleries. • Allows you to override the page titles on specific pages so that you can keyword optimize.
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But these header tags have a semantic meaning in SEO. Because the tags have an implicit hierarchy (<h1> through <h5>), Google assumes that the <h1> content is more important than the <h5> content. And more specifically, Google only wants to see one instance of the <h1> on the page. So what should the <h1> be used for? It’s very similar to a page title, but unlike a page title, the header content actually shows up in the viewable page. A logical piece of text to put into a header would be something like a gallery name or an image name. While you don’t have to have a header tag on your page, it’s just another one of those SEO signals that will give you an incremental boost. So use it if you can.
Meta description There are a number of “meta” tags that can be defined for a webpage, and none of them appear on the actual page. Instead, they are placed into the “<head>” of the webpage where they exist solely for the enjoyment of search engines. Meta description is an influential field that you can populate with keyword hit list terms. But more importantly, the meta description appears on a search engine result page below the page title.
DO THIS • Make sure that your most important content is enclosed by an <h1>. • Only use one <h1> per page.
DOn’t do THIS • Think that the <h2> or other header tags is weighted equally by the search engines as the <h1>tag. • Try to stuff all your text into the <h1> tag. Google is smarter than you think.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter automatically extracts gallery names and image names into the <h1> tag.
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When the meta description isn’t present, Google looks for text on the page, and inserts whatever it thinks is the best choice for a description. If you’ve ever seen a search result that has just a list of non-linked navigation names, this is because the site owner didn’t specify a meta description. The meta description is a good complement to the page title, because it can be used to create variants of your important keywords.
DO THIS • Make sure you use the meta description to bolster your keyword hit list terms. • Make the meta descriptions unique to each page.
For example, your page title might be: Corporate CEO Stock Photos And your meta description might be: CEO Images specializes in stock photos of the top CEOs in the US and abroad including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Dell and more.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter allows you to insert custom meta descriptions into many pages. • Gallery pages automatically insert your gallery description text into the meta description field. • Image pages automatically insert the respective IPTC descriptions into the meta descriptions field.
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On-page text The judicious use of keywords in the body text of your web pages helps reinforce the words and phrases that are most important to your business. Avoid exclusively using colloquial phrases like “shot” instead of “photograph” or “image” because users are much more likely to search for the latter. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking that only displaying an image is the best way to convey that you’re a photographer. You must have text on your website (and a lot of it) to be successful with SEO.
DO THIS • Include a description of your services on your homepage. • Include a description of each gallery that you publish. • Include captions for each photo that you publish.
DOn’t do THIS • Take a minimalist approach to the inclusion of copy on your site. The attitude of “letting my photos speak for themselves” has no bearing in an SEO strategy. It might be pretty, but it won’t generate any new leads.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • Allows you to type in descriptive text on your homepage. • Allows you to include gallery descriptions and image captions. • Allows you to configure an optional “About Me” page for further keyword optimization.
Washington DC Photographer Mark Finkenstadt uses strategically chosen keywords on his homepageg
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ALT attribute In HTML, the <img> tag is used to display an image on a webpage. Like many HTML tags, the <img> tag has a number of “attributes” that can be specified (e.g. width and height). The ALT attribute stands for “alternate text” and was originally designed for the visually impaired so that browsers could read back the description of the image to the user.
DO THIS • Make sure you’re populating the ALT attribute with a caption or keywords for every image on your website. Include a description of each gallery that you publish.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter automatically populates the ALT attribute with your IPTC description.
What a website with images looks like to humans.
What the same website with images looks like to search engines.
It is now one of the signals affecting SEO, and while you can have a printed description/caption near an image on a webpage, the ALT attribute is a fairly definitive way to describe an image to a search engine.
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Filename If getting your images into Google Images is a prime concern for you, then you might want to consider adding relevant keywords to your filename. Photographers often find this practice disruptive to their DAM (digital asset management) strategy, so we normally don’t advise this as a first step in improving your SEO. However, there is a very strong correlation between filename and the top results for Google Images.
DO THIS • Consider renaming your files with relevant keywords (e.g. “empire-statebuilding.jpg” instead of “IMG_123.jpg”).
Keywords in the URL Human-readable URLs are very common in the blogosphere, but less common in photographer websites. Very rarely will you see a URL like http://joephoto.com/gallery/Grand-canyon-Photos. But Google likes these human-readable URLs because they can give a user a clue as to what the link is, and they help reinforce important keywords. Look no further than retail giant Amazon.com to understand the importance of keywords in the URL: http://www.amazon.com/Nikon-16-2-Digital-1080p-Video/dp/B006U49XM6
DO THIS • Make sure any website templates that you are using support keywords in the URLs.
DOn’t do THIS • Use a Flash-based website that doesn’t generate unique page URLs. Unfortunately, Flash-based websites that support keywords in the URL are rare.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter inserts your gallery names into the URL automatically
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Microformats Webpages are unstructured data. Unlike a database, there’s nothing in a webpage to definitively say, “This is a recipe, this is an ingredient, and this is a measurement.” Humans can intuit certain things from reading a page, but computers aren’t so smart. In order to provide more structure to data on the page, an informal consortium of programmers and companies developed various microformat specifications as a way to semantically markup information on the page. This includes microformat specs and drafts for things like:
• People: hCard • Events: hCalendar • Recipes • Ratings and Reviews: hReview • Products
DO THIS • Check to see if your webpages use microformats: http://www.google.com/ webmasters/tools/richsnippets • Use the image microformat markup in your webpages.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter automatically uses microformats in our website themes.
There’s even a microformat for images. Google has stated that microformats don’t directly affect SEO, but they’ve countered that good structured data can’t hurt, and we’ve certainly observed significant improvement of indexed content as a result of using microformats on pages featuring images. Using microformats requires a little bit of technical knowledge and access to your webpage templates. But we think it’s a particularly strong signal for images, so we advocate using them.
Site speed Have you ever visited a website that had a long animated intro graphic that seemingly served no purpose? Did you leave the website before it finished loading? Website speed has become a more prominent signal in the past year. And while it’s debatable how influential website speed is to overall SEO, Google has made a point of integrating more site speed tools into its services like Google Webmaster and Google Analytics.
DO THIS • Make sure to eliminate any animations or large objects from your homepage that affect its speed.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • We’re constantly monitoring overall site speed and optimizing our code to ensure responsive webpages.
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You can see the Google Analytics site speed report here:
Site speed is often not something that photographers can control because site speed can be affected by a number of issues (e.g. quality of code, load on the servers, Flash, videos, etc). However, when assessing website providers, make sure that your website is loading quickly – particularly when it comes to the homepage.
Sitemaps & indexability In order to show up in search results, you first need to be included in Google’s index. With well over a trillion webpages in existence, Google has to decide which pages to include, or else the resources to serve results would be untenable. You can see how many pages are included in Google by typing the following: site:[your domain]
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter automatically creates and submits a sitemap of your galleries and images to Google on a weekly basis. • You can find your sitemap at [website domain]/sitemap.xml
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You can see how many images are included in Google Images by performing the same query on Google Images.
The number of pages indexed is partially a reflection of quality of SEO. But another part of the equation is whether or not Google knows your website.
The number of pages indexed is partially a reflection of quality of SEO. But another part of the equation is whether or not Google knows your website and associated pages exist in the first place. A sitemap is one way to ensure that your top content is known to Google.
Flash Adobe Flash is a technology used by many websites because of its attractive user interface elements (e.g. crossfading transitions, elegant dropdown menus, etc). However, Flash cannot be reliably indexed by the major search engines. The best Flash website software programs and vendors build HTML mirror sites to allow search engines to see the contents of a website, but most do not.
Appleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lack of support for Flash on iOS devices (e.g. iPhone and iPad) has made it all the more imperative to avoid Flash. For photographer websites, jQuery provides all the standard visualization tools that most Flash websites utilize. photoshelter.com
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Building Backlinks
Creating a Massive Online Footprint
At the turn of the millennium, the typical photographer’s website was a set of galleries that represented the photographer’s best work. In other words, the website was a digital translation of a printed portfolio. A decade later, most photographers are still following the model that their website should only display their top work, which can often amount to 30-50 images. From a SEO perspective, this is absolutely the wrong way to proceed. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with having a section of your website dedicated to your portfolio. But by restricting the number of images, and there separate webpages, you publish to your top images (e.g. 30-50 pages), you are effectively making yourself the needle in the haystack.
Instead of 50 images of your top work, why not have 5,000 of your commercially viable images, all properly captioned and keyworded?
We strongly oppose this approach. Instead, your goal should be to become the haystack. Instead of 50 images of your top work, why not have 5,000 of your commercially viable images, all properly captioned and keyworded? Give yourself a better chance of getting found.
Getting People to Link to You
We’ve emphasized the importance of building backlinks, but how do you get people to link to you? There are two main categories: 1) backlinks you build yourself, and 2) backlinks from other people.
Linking to yourself Joining trade groups or community sites is one easy way of linking back to yourself. Most photo trade organizations have profile pages for their members, and from these pages, you can easily link to yourself. Because these trade sites typically have good domain strength and are authoritative within photography, they are great backlinks to have.
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DO THIS â&#x20AC;˘ Join community and trade organizations that allow you to create profiles with links to your website. â&#x20AC;˘ Start and maintain a blog.
Create a profile on a site like SportShooter and include direct links to your website, blog, and more.
Secondly, we highly recommend a blog. Blogs give you a very easy way to self publish. You control the content and the keywords used to describe your photos, and you can link back to specific images or galleries within your website. This level of specificity is crucial in building overall SEO, because having links to only your homepage will have limited effect in building SEO against a very large corpus of related terms.
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Getting others to link to you Simply stated, the best way to get others to link to you is to shoot something interesting. Flowers in your backyard aren’t interesting. A hummingbird feeding on your flowers taken with an ultra high speed flash is interesting. We like how North Carolina-based Shawn Rocco started one of the early cellphone camera blogs, http://cellularobscura.blogspot.com/, which earned backlinks from PDN, the New York Times, PhotoShelter, Look3 and many more. It didn’t require special access or special equipment – just perseverance and a great eye.
There’s also the concept of “link bait,” which is a blog post or webpage that might be controversial, humorous, contrarian, newsworthy, etc. Maybe you got one of the first Nikon D4s and wrote a review. Bingo! Consider how things other than photos can help generate backlinks to your website.
DO THIS • Shoot and publish interesting photos that are attractive to a wide audience. • Write blog posts using “link bait” ideas.
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Anchor Text
HTML allows a user to specify which text is a link. The best SEO links use keywords as the link text rather than generic phrases. For example: BAD: This is a gallery of my photos of the Empire State Building Todd Owyoung is a great photographer who shoots live music photos GOOD: This is a gallery of my photos of the Empire State Building Todd Owyoung is a great photographer who photographs live music photos
Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
Generally speaking, we advise photographers to build as many links as possible. Each link is a “vote” or endorsement of your website, which will improve your SEO. This is a very easy way to understand backlink creation. In truth, backlink analysis is a bit more complex, and all backlinks aren’t weighted equally. For example, it’s much more significant for the New York Times Lens Blog to link to your website than for Cotton, Inc., because the Lens Blog has topical relevance. That isn’t to say that you’ll be penalized for the Cotton link, it just won’t have as significant of an effect.
DO THIS • Consider maintaining a blog so that you can build inbound links to your core photography website with your keyword hit list in mind. • Encourage others to use descriptive text to link to you.
DO THIS • Try to build link traffic from photorelated or arts-related websites. • Try to build link traffic from complementary service providers in your industry (e.g. a wedding photographer might seek links from caterers, florists, dressmakers, and stationery vendors).
This is, in part, why buying links isn’t a good idea. One out of place link from cotton.com is innocuous, but 1,000 backlinks from unrelated sites starts to look pretty fishy to Google. This is the type of activity that is likely to get you blacklisted.
Google Places
A large percentage of searches are geographic-specific, like “new york commerical photographer,” “honolulu wedding photographer,” “belize scuba photos.” When Google returns results that have a geographic component, they often supercede the standard results with the Google Maps “7-pack.” These are a set of results plotted on a clickable map. How do you get into the map? You need to create a free Google Places account at google.com/places.
DO THIS • Even if you don’t have a physical storefront, create a free Google Places account. • Try to generate positive reviews on Google, Yelp! and other related sites. People are more apt to click on 7-pack results with a high star rating.
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Age of Site
The age of a domain is a decent indication of a site credibility. If your website has only been registered for 3 months, that tells a different story than a site that has been around for a decade. It is, in essence, no different than weighing whether to do business with a start-up or an established player. For this reason, we recommend that you register a domain immediately (if you haven’t already done so), and if financially possible, register the domain for many years in advance.
Social Media & SEO
Every year, the braniacs at SEOmoz (one of the leading resources for SEO) survey the top SEO experts to assess what factors are driving SEO. Of all the many signals that drive SEO, social media jumped the most in influence in the past year. When you think about the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that the search engines are looking at these services as a barometer of what is important and influential on the web.
DO THIS • Register your own domain as soon as possible. • Renew it for multiple years at a time.
DO THIS • Participate in social media and encourage as much activity by others as possible.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP
Last year’s backlink is this year’s Facebook “Like”, tweet or +1. And although we cannot assume causation, there is a high degree of correlation between the top search results for any term and the amount of social activity it has relative to lower ranking terms. In other words, the guy who ranks #1 for “philly wedding photographer” has a lot of Likes, tweets, and +1’s.
So it’s become imperative for photographers to participate in social media, not only for the obvious marketing reasons (e.g. their customers are hanging out on these sites, and therefore go to where your customers are), but also because the search engines are keying into these signals, which affects search engine results.
• Our websites allow you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn links to your galleries and images. • Download our free Photographer’s Social Media Handbook guide to learn more.
If you engage in “black hat” techniques like paying for backlinks, Google will frown upon this activity because it’s considered to be “gaming” the system. photoshelter.com
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Penalization vs. Ignoring
You do not want to anger the Google overlords and incur a penalization, because this could result in your website dropping out of the Google index altogether. What would cause a penalization? If you engage in “black hat” techniques like paying for backlinks, Google will frown upon this activity because it’s considered to be “gaming” the system. On the other hand, there are a lot of things you can do that will simply be ignored, like making keyword lists or meta keywords. Back in the early days of search, people figured out that if they put a lot of keywords on their page that had nothing to do with their content, they could rank for those terms. This is because early search engines used word frequency as the basis for their search algorithms. But when Google introduced PageRank (essentially a backlink counter) as the basis for their algorithm, keyword clusters essentially became obsolete. You can put them on your page, but they won’t have any effect on your SEO. So if your website has a long list of terms at the bottom of your pages, you’re just messing up your site design. Insofar as keywords are concerned, however, there is a legitimate use for keywords on the page – especially if you sell stock photography. Why? Because stock photographer sites traditionally have keyword clusters to make it easier for buyers to find similar images.
A website has to satisfy the needs to two major audiences: 1) human visitors who represent your current and future customers, and 2) search engines that will drive unsolicited traffic to your site.
A website has to satisfy the needs to two major audiences: 1) human visitors who represent your current and future customers, and 2) search engines that will drive unsolicited traffic to your site. For stock photographers, keyword clusters (as seen above) helped their customers find what they are looking for, and for that reason, we would advocate enabling this type of feature. But if your customers don’t need it (e.g. you’re a wedding or fine art photographer), don’t bother enabling it. photoshelter.com
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Panda
In February 2011, Google introduced a change to its search ranking algorithm, which was designed to push low quality sites (specifically content farms like eHow) down in the search rankings. The content farms often produced non-credible, low quality information, or they republished content from other sites without permission. Google claims that the changes were successful, but many photography sites were adversely affected. The question is, why?
Panda
We witnessed severe drops of traffic (some sites lost 80% of their traffic), while other sites remained unaffected. Curiously, when we analyzed the sites that had precipitous drops, we saw that they lost traffic in all categories: 1) Direct traffic, 2) Search engine traffic, and 3) Link traffic. We can only assume that there is some resonance effect that would cause a drop in search engine traffic to affect direct traffic. Although the question of why some sites lost traffic while other didn’t is impossible to answer definitively, our observations suggest that websites that were on the threshold (e.g. had a low number of backlinks and poor on-page factors) were disproportionately hit by Panda and the successive Panda modifications (there were five in 2011). Panda is not the first algorithmic change to the searcg engine, and it won’t be the last. It’s important to stay up-to-date on SEO best practices and only engage in legitimate strategies approved by the experts.
Benchmarking & Analytics
Before you start you may want to put some benchmarks in place to measure your campaign’s effectiveness. Options here can be simple – like doing searches to see where you rank today vs. after you apply our tactics. Or they can be more elaborate, like employing Google Analytics to gauge your progress more analytically. We strongly advocate Google Analytics for increased fidelity and detail.
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Search Results Benchmarks Your “benchmark” is simply your starting point – your current state. You should establish your benchmarks before making any SEO changes. You can easily use your target keyword list to track your initial benchmark and subsequent progress over the following weeks and months. Perform searches and note where you appear in the results (page # and listing # on page). Make sure you’ve disabled one of Google’s newest features, “Search by Web history,” which alters search results based on your prior behavior.
Google Analytics Benchmarks Although a detailed explanation of Google Analytics is beyond the scope of this guide, here are some basic stats you can track to get a sense of how your search rankings are impacting the volume and quality of your site traffic:
Your bounce rate for search traffic should go down if your search terms are effectively driving relevant traffic.
Traffic Volume If your SEO strategy is working, you should see an increase in visitors to your site. (Of course, other factors could change from month to month that make it difficult to attribute traffic patterns directly to your SEO efforts.)
Traffic Sources Google Analytics gives you a pie chart in your “Traffic Sources Overview” report that shows your unique visits from search engines vs. people directly typing your URL vs. links from other sites (“referrals”). If your SEO strategy is working, your absolute number of visitors coming from search engines, and probably your percent of traffic from search engines, should go up.
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Bounce Rate 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, Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated: “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (or above) is worrying.” But it is also 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. For example, you might have photos of Kim Kardashian, but the people who are finding your site via search might be teenagers and celebrity hounds instead of magazine editors. 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.
Keywords Look at your “Traffic Sources – Keywords” report. This shows the top keywords visitors are searching for to reach your site. For each keyword, the report shows the number of visits resulting from it, as well as other relevant stats like bounce rate and time spent on site. If your SEO strategy is working, you should get more visits every month for your target keywords. You can create a chart to track these Google Analytics benchmarks as well, or use the date range capabilities to make sure that your metrics are improving. You want to be generating more visits via more keywords over time.
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Measuring Your Progress We recommend measuring your progress on a regular basis – once a month or once a quarter. You may also want to note on your tracking sheets which changes you’ve made to SEO factors and when, so you can associate results with efforts and adjust your tactics accordingly. Here are 6 metrics to track: 1. Number of visitors (total): From Google Analytics, view the Dashboard for total traffic. 2. Number of visitors via search: From Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources -> Search” 3. Number of keywords driving search traffic: From Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic” 4. Number of indexed pages: From google.com, type “site:[your domain name]” 5. Number of indexed images: From images.google.com, type “site:[your domain name]” 6. Number of backlinks: From majesticseo.com, type your domain name into the query box, and take note of the number of backlinks and domains.
Google Webmaster Tools
We are big fans of Google Analytics for the seemingly endless number of reports and high degree of detail. On the other hand, Google Webmaster Tools offers one unique report, which is the average position of your website for a given term during the reported period.
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The position is average because Google is constantly tweaking (and testing) the position of various search results. When you have newly published content, there might be a slight bias towards a higher ranking. But if your webpage fails to get significant clickthrough, then Google might progressively drop it in the rankings. The position of your search result is a fairly nuanced statistic to track. Nevertheless, if you’re gung-ho about understanding how your SEO is changing over time, it’s an invaluable statistic.
So, how am I doing?
There aren’t any hard rules for empirically judging how well you are doing. Obviously, if you have found your way to the first page of results for your target terms, you are excelling! In the absence of a hard science that applies to all circumstances, we’d encourage you just to keep track of your benchmarks and make sure your key stats are moving in the right direction over time. Is your traffic going up overall? Is your search traffic going up? Is your bounce rate going down? Are your visits from your target keywords going up? If so, then you’re doing well – keep going. Having open discussions with other photographers will certainly help you gauge your progress too.
Optimizing Other Sites Facebook Edgerank The News Feed can be found in the center column of your Facebook homepage with a constantly updating list of stories and interactions from the people and Pages you follow. When you log on, the News Feed is the running real-time list of photos, videos, comments, likes, and status updates direct from your network of friends and pages.
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • PhotoShelter’s SEO Grader is a tool that’s built into all PhotoShelter accounts. It will scan your website SEO as often as you’d like. The tool scores you on completeness for over 30 different on-page SEO factors within your control, and provides specific action steps on how to improve. • Of course, the ultimate indicator of success is new revenue. Strategies for driving conversion – getting people to become paying customers once they visit your site – is another important topic, for another time! For now, we hope this guide has helped you create a strategy for driving qualified leads to your site in volumes that are significant to your business.
But how does Facebook decide which content to show you in your News Feed? According to Facebook, it depends: “The News Feed algorithm uses several factors, including: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update).” In September 2011, Facebook redesigned the News Feed, and now shows you the most interesting and engaging posts from your network since you last logged on. Prior, the News Feed was divided into two separate sections: Top News and Recent News, both of which showcased updates from your friends and page likes in chronological order.
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Why Care About the New News Feed: Facebook’s News Feed change came about because Facebook realized that people aren’t always looking for the most recent news from their network they’re looking for what’s most interesting. This means that you need to post content about your photography business that is engaging and interesting to your target audience. The more that people interact with a post of yours, the more likely it will appear higher on people’s News Feeds and get noticed by a greater pool of people. This increases brand awareness, and provides the greatest opportunity to expand your reach and engage new people. Producing engaging content (e.g. asking questions, posting photos, videos, sharing an interesting article, etc.) is crucial because after a user “likes” your page, they may rarely visit your page again. Instead, they’ll stay up to date with you via the status updates and posts they see from you in their own Feed. Because the content that gets “picked” for Facebook’s News Feed depends on its popularity and engagements (comments and number of likes), you need to produce content that provokes both these things from your network.
If you plan on marketing your services as a videographer, it’s important to consider what you can do to improve your video SEO.
Understanding Facebook Edgerank: “Edgerank” is the Facebook algorithm that determines what items appear in your News Feed, based on a number of factors like “Likes,” “Shares,” and “Comments.” In Facebook parlance, each “object” you share (e.g. photos, comments, links) is called an “edge,” and if the edge reaches a certain scoring threshold, it will be displayed in a user’s News Feed. That’s why prompting people for comments - asking a question, posing trivia questions, and soliciting feedback - is proven to be one of the most effective ways to engage people and get your content seen. To improve your Edgerank and your chances of getting to the News Feed, research also shows that you should incorporate videos, include links, relate your posts to a current events, and interact with those who post on your page. Your Edgerank can also skyrocket by promoting time-sensitive promotions. Are you offering a 15% discounts off all your prints for the next two weeks? Case studies show that reposting the same campaign image next to a different comment will engage users and improve your chances of getting to the top of the News Feed.
YouTube
Last year, YouTube passed Yahoo! as the second largest search engine. If you plan on marketing your services as a videographer, it’s important to consider what you can do to improve your video SEO. If you use Vimeo instead of YouTube, much of the following may still be applicable, although Vimeo’s particular search algorithm may differ from YouTube’s. Keep in mind that Google Video search results are more all-encompassing than YouTube’s results, since Google Video will crawl the entire web (not just YouTube) for videos that match your search terms. However, the work you do on your YouTube SEO can still have a positive impact on where your videos appear in Google Video results. photoshelter.com
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Metadata Optimizing your on-page factors takes just a few minutes and can easily be done while you’re waiting for your video to upload to YouTube. Metadata is the information around your video on the view page, including Title, Tags, Description, and Thumbnail. Like the meta description of your PhotoShelter website, metadata is visible to both search engines and real people. For example, if you search for “utah wedding video,” the metadata will help provide you with relevant search results, and it’s likely that “utah wedding video” is even matched word-for-word in the results. YouTube’s Creator Playbook even points out the importance of this information, saying, “Metadata is critical to building views from search and related videos as it greatly affects the algorithm” (pg. 36).
Like keywords for your photos, tags are important in order for potential viewers to find your video quickly.
Title Your video title should both accurately describe the content of the video and draw potential viewers in – much like a newspaper headline, it should spark viewers’ curiosity and compel them to find out more by watching. If you choose to put your branding in the title, it should appear after the video name, e.g. “Heather & Will | Salt Lake Temple | Utah Wedding Pros.”
Tags Like keywords for your photos, tags are important in order for potential viewers to find your video quickly. According to ReelSEO.com, a comprehensive video marketing site, YouTube recommends 12 or more tags. You can include single words in addition to phrases (grouped in quotation marks), so the syntax might be something like: wedding “wedding video” videography “long island wedding” “new york wedding” “new york videographer” Tags should include a mix of common and specific search keywords, including variations on common search terms about your video content. If you need ideas for tags, surveying the comments left by viewers is a great way to find suggestions you may not have thought of before. While there is no tag count limit on YouTube, keyword spam is frowned upon, so don’t overpopulate this field with irrelevant tags, or you may have your YouTube account shut down. Vimeo has a 20-tag limit.
Description Like the meta description of your PhotoShelter site, the description of your YouTube video should accurately summarize your video while using keywords from your hit list. In the bottom of this description, you can (and should!) include links to your PhotoShelter or social media sites.
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Thumbnail If you have a regular YouTube account (as opposed to a premium YouTube Partner account), you will only have a choice of three thumbnails, picked out by YouTube as you upload, but it’s still important to try to choose a thumbnail that you think will draw viewers in if they see if on your channel page.
Other Video SEO Factors It is difficult to determine the perfect storm of factors that lead to a high ranking among YouTube results, but experts advise you to judge your SEO performance by other criteria, asking yourself:
• Does my video have good ratings? • Are there a lot of comments on my video? • Have I created themed playlists of my videos on my YouTube channel for viewers to easily find my work based on their interests? • Does my video have a lot of backlinks to it and/or or have a lot of viewers shared it?
PHOTOSHELTER CAN HELP • If your PhotoShelter site is integrated with your Wordpress blog, you can embed YouTube or Vimeo videos directly into your blog posts. This is a great way to share new content and increase awareness with your readers about the diversity of your business’ services.
Annotations If you’re really gung ho about YouTube SEO, adding annotations to your video, such as in-video subtitles or a transcript in the description below the video, will greatly boost your chances of having the video discovered. However, this may not work for every style of video out there, and it can be a lengthy process.
Quality Deserves Freshness Publishing videos regularly will improve your ranking. If you have a lot of video content to share, consider posting a new video every week as part of your regular work to-do list.
So, How Are My Videos Doing? YouTube Analytics offers great tools for analyzing your video SEO, just like Google Analytics does for your website SEO. You can easily track views, viewer demographics, traffic sources (including search keywords for individual videos), and audience retention, among other factors.
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Resources We rely on a number of resources to chart and improve our own SEO. Below are some of our favorites.
Majestic SEO
The largest publicly available backlink index. It does one simple and important function: namely, tell you how many backlinks and domains are pointed to your website. Since backlinks are one of the strongest SEO signals, MajesticSEO gives you key insight into why your SEO may or may not be working. http://www.majesticseo.com | Free
ReelSEO
ReelSEO offers a smorgasbord of news, case analyses, and advice for those interested in online video marketing. Check out the YouTube Marketing & SEO Channel for more specific articles. http://www.reelseo.com | Free
SEOmoz
SEOmoz provides a subscription-based service for monitoring your SEO. Although the tool is overkill for most individuals, the website does provide a wealth of information through its blog and community of SEO experts. http://www.seomoz.org | starting at $99/month
Search Engine Land
Can’t get enough SEO information? Sign up for Search Engine Land’s daily digest of SEO news. We do. http://www.searchengineland.com | Free
Marketing Grader
Inbound marketing company Hubspot created the Marketing Grader (and the now defunct Website Grader) to measure many different aspects of your website’s marketing and SEO (and act as a lead generation mechanism for their company). While the tool isn’t specifically designed for photographers and photography websites, it’s still provides a comprehensive set of metrics to help you understand how to improve your SEO and Social Media interaction. http://marketing.grader.com | Free photoshelter.com
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PhotoShelter SEO Grader
The PhotoShelter SEO Grader charts on-page factors within your PhotoShelter website, and provides you with a numeric score to gauge your SEO readiness. The Grader provides specific, actionable guidance to help you improve your SEO today. http://www.photoshelter.com/mem/site/grader Free for PhotoShelter members
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Read all PhotoShelter guides http://www.photoshelter.com/mkt/research/
FIND US online http://www.photoshelter.com @photoshelter http://www.facebook.com/PhotoShelter http://vimeo.com/photoshelter