I have been reading alot about SEO (search engine optimization) for my other websites recently, and figured that I would create an overview SEO document for photobloggers.
Basically, SEO is the practice of ranking well on various search engines in order to get visitors to your site via searches.
Before you start any SEO project, remember one thing - that SEO is a marathon not a race! Plan for the long-term and don’t make massive changes all at once. Measure the increase (or decrease) your changes make and act accordingly!
Pick your keywords
This is probably the most important part of your entire SEO plan. Make sure that you’re picking keyword phrases (i.e. 3-4 words) these convert better than anything else, and will help you rank faster (hopefully). Start brainstorming your keyword phrases and get them down on paper. Then check out Google Adwords Keyword tool and see how often those phrases are searched.
Get an analytics program
Before you do anything, get yourself some software to monitor your websites usage, and how people are finding you. I currently use Mint, but you can also go with Google Analytics. You need to have something, so pick which ever one you feel most comfortable using.
Page titles
Make sure that every page on your photoblog has a title! This seems like a no-brainer, but I cannot tell you how many photoblogs I have visited that have ‘Untitled’ as a page title. Also, make sure that the most important keyword phrases are on the left-side of the page title. So if you’re really working on branding your site, you may want your site name to come first.
Image title
Make sure that every image has a title - try to avoid ‘untitled’ as much as you can! Make sure that your image title appears as a H1/H2 header.
Image tags
Make sure that you have ALT and TITLE tags for every image. This will help people find your images.
If you can I would go as far as making sure each image also has HEIGHT and WIDTH tags.
Write!
If you have no text with your images, than people are going to have a difficult time finding you. If you look
at the most popular photoblogs these artists have great descriptive write-ups accompanying their photoblogs - it’s very important. Also, consider publishing your EXIF information - at least your camera make/model and lens specifications people search for this kind of stuff all the time. Make sure that you use the keywords that you would like to rank with in your writing, just make sure that you’re still writing for people and not the search engines!
Sitemap
make sure that you have a sitemap for your photoblog. This just makes your site easier to index when a search engine comes knocking. There are some great plugins out there to help you do this, just make sure that you do it!
Avoid content duplication
Try to avoid duplication as much as possible. Assign posts/images to only one category if you have too much duplicate content then your site may be penalized.
Category Pages (a.k.a Inner Linking)
This allows your visitor to easily locate images with similar attributes and it create internal links on your site. Having internal links helps to raise the “value” of the page being linked.
What about Flickr, coolphotoblogs, photoblogs.org, and vxfy?
*NOTE: These really aren’t consider to be SEO methods.
The value of this depends on what your goal is. If you’re trying to attract other photobloggers to your site then by all means. Get listed on these sites. The problem is that you’re site is going to get lost in the shuffle quickly. So many images and blogs are being listed on these sites that it gets hard to get traffic, and most likely the traffic you’re going to get won’t be the most motivated buyers. In my opinion I would start with Flickr and go from there. The reason being that I have seen quite a few people use Flickr as a method to search for an image that they are after - not that these turn into sales, but I think you’ll have more success.
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4 responses so far ↓
Totally agree about “untitled” for images and headers. Never really though about writing for the images but must admit I always enjoy reading the chromasia text. Time for a rethink possibly…
Rob,
David’s work speaks for itself, but I agree that I spend just as much time reading his text as looking at his work. Not only does it help with SEO, but I think that it helps to build connections with your readers.
Brett
You missed the most important aspect of SEO, links!
In order to rank highly in the search engines a website, not just a blog, must links that point to it from a 3rd party website. The 3rd party websites should be relevant and of a similar topic to your own.
The links that you acquire should be keyword descriptive, in other words if you are trying to rank for the phrase ‘2008 photoblog’ you should ensure that the sites that are linking to you do so with the phrase ‘2008 photoblog’. Search engines read the text and figure if the link reads ‘2008 photoblog’ then it must be relevant.
The easiest way to describe links: Look at it like a popularity contest, the more links (votes) your site has the more popular it must be and the higher it should rank. But be sure to find quality links from sites that are similar in topic/nature to your own.
@Craig: Thanks for pointing out that omission!