Search Engine Optimization for Photographers (SEO) Part I

May 062011
 

Photographers have it tough when it comes to achieving decent rankings in search engines for the very simple reason that search engines are not yet smart enough to understand images.  However, they don’t really understand language either (if you ask me).  But after years of having decent rankings for my key phrases, I can give you the following bits of advice:

Figure out what your primary keyword phrase is.  You can’t even begin to think about achieving your goals without knowing this.  And don’t even think about going for something very general to begin with.  For example: PHOTOGRAPHY is not a phrase.  DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY is a phrase, but think of your competition.  No – don’t think of your competition – go to the search engine of your choice (probably Google) and enter your keyword phrase and see who comes up on the first two pages.

I really don’t think many people go beyond the first two pages before they find something that attracts their attention.

The more narrow your keyword search, the great chance you have of ranking well.  But your keyword phrase also has to be accurate.  There is just no point in getting people to your site by faking them out since they’ll immediately see this isn’t what they expected, plus your site is going to be designed around your keyword phrase.  So make the whole thing honest.   If you photograph nature, you are going to have to narrow it down somehow.

In my own case, I went after two phrases from day one: BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY (which is fairly broad) and NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHY which is narrower.  And then you begin to think of all the permutations: B&W Photos of New York, Central Park Photography, NYC Photos in Black and White etc. etc.

And no – your company name is not your keyword phrase. If someone promises you a number one position, and you find out that it’s for YOUR NAME PHOTOGRAPHY – that’s idiotic. Anyone can do that. That’s for searchers who already know you. You want searchers who never heard of you before but know the product they want.

Again, once you come up with your phrase – test it out and see what you get in the search engine.  Then pick the top sites that are similar, or in the same league as your own – and study them.  They didn’t get there by accident.  When I say study them, I mean:

1) In your browser, go to view source and do a search for keyword phrases
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Google Merchant Part I

May 052011
 

In the previous Google Base post about this somewhat arcane subject, I wrote about the difficulty of getting any traction for my prints in this section, namely when you do a google search and then click on SHOPPING.

Google Merchant Dashboard

The SHOPPING link (on the left) brings you to what are called FEEDS which are simply files in a particular layout with products that Google can then evaluate in certain ways and decide whether to show to the general populace or not.

The first line in the file CSV (delimited format) might look something – no it actually in my own case looks exactly like this:
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Blurb Black and White Photo Book

May 032011
 

I picked the smallest size book (7 x 7 inches) on Blurb (and did it as a photo book softcover)

Black and white images were profiled to sRGB (as recommended) and in Lightroom, they were set to Black and White (similar to using the b&w filter in Photoshop).

Image sizes were all set so that the longest side was 3500 px

They were “pre-sharpened) but not “post sharpened) with NIK software (post-sharpening photos for publishing is very tricky since you don’t always know what the size of the finall book is going to be — i.e. I may choose to do this larger and post sharpening should be for the exact print size).
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Google Base and Merchant Center

Apr 302011
 


First they called it Froogle. Then Google Base.  And recently the name became the Merchant Center.

This is where Bing and Google are going head-to-head.  Bing wants to be the goto place for people searching for stuff to buy.  And Google has added the Shopping link so that you can see what’s for sale.  And so I was looking at this wondering what I had to do to put my own photos up for sale so they’d show up.

Here’s a typical search for Dave Beckerman Photography in the Google Shopping tab.
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WordPress Tip for FotoMoto

Apr 242011
 

I was wondering why all the offered sizes through the Fotomoto cart had changed in my WordPress store.  My image files had been carefully produced so that they had aspect ratios or either 2/3, 4/5, or 1/1 (square).

And the last time I checked – everything was working as expected.  Well no – the last to the last time I checked they were working as expected.  I’m using the WordPress theme Suffusion which allows you to easily alter your page layout to a “fluid” or “fixed” setting.

I must have recently changed the theme layout to “fixed” – probably when I was futzing with things to get them right for that iPad.

When I switched to fixed width the images were too big and were being “squeezed.”  Fotomoto reads this “squeezed”  aspect ratio of the image as opposed to the actual size of the image.

Anyway – I found the option after a lot of hunting (that happens in the WordPress Suffusion theme) and set it back to “fluid” and then all the sizes came up correctly in the BUY PRINT box.

Just a big tip if one day you look at your BUY PRINT box and find that all the offered sizes look odd and have fractions and stuff like that.  Even if you’ve set FLEXIBLE PRICING in the Fotomoto dashboard which helps if things aren’t too far out of whack.

And if you’re reading this and not using a WordPress theme, and don’t know what a fluid layout is, and don’t care about Fotomoto… sorry…

You know – that Suffusion Theme is pretty popular.  If I have a chance, I’d write a quick cheat sheet for it, if it hasn’t been done already, and maybe even if it has.

Column One: You Want To Do This

Column Two: This is where and how to do it.

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The iPad with SquareUp Vendor

Apr 212011
 

A few years back, when things were looking bleak, I took my prints and setup a stand outside the Metropolitan Museum.  It was a tough life.  You got your place based on who got there first to stake out their claim; and you had to lug around prints and mats etc.

Sometimes, you’d go through a 12 hour day without a single sale.  Other times, you might make a hundred bucks in a day.  Eventually, the web site took off and I concentrated on that.  But this morning, I was thinking about another way to go about it that would be much easier and take very little planning:

Get yourself an iPad, make sure you had a wifi connection to this site, and bring a few actual prints, as examples, but it could all be easily carried whenever you felt in the mood.  Set up your card table and your iPod, and a couple of prints; and the iPod itself would be your kiosk.  People could cruise through the site while you were there to chat about it; and sales would be done on the spot.

I expect I’m missing something – it seems too easy.  But still something to think about.  Plus, of course I want the iPad anyway, for the occasional presentation or just to have with me to show anyone that I happen to meet.  Have iPad – will travel.

Then you get that SQUAREUP credit card swiper that attaches to your Smart Phone and now you can take credit cards! Here’s a link to the SQUAREUP.COM site. I might sign up for it myself soon.

Deal done.

selling-at-met0214

I doubt if this guy bought anything… looks a bit too enthralled.

Now, with all that being said about the “future of selling photography on the street” – one of the pleasure is that people can just pick up the item and go to the next museum with it.  But then again, you could set things up to actually place the order through your FOTOMOTO Site and have them send it to where they live.  Yup.  That is also interesting twist.  Hmm.

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The Anvil and the Tree

Mar 142011
 

In my best moments, I see my situation as a cartoon.   I’m a few yards away from the edge of a precipice.  A rope is tied around my waist as it might be in an old-fashioned tug-of-war contest, and at the other end of the rope, hanging and swinging  from the edge of the cliff is the Monty Python anvil that now reads FINANCES!

Over the last ten years, that damned anvil has been draining my strength.  Ten years since I had a steady income.  Ten years of straining to live a more free life.

And now, I can feel that my shoes have been worn through by digging in so hard all this time.  I’m close enough to be able to look over this precipice and see what’s below.

And what I see is somehow reassuring.  The drop is not high enough to kill me.  In fact, I now remember that I’ve fallen off this cliff many times before – and I’m still here.  What I do need to figure out is how to remove this rope from my waist and tie it to a nearby tree.  And I have an idea about just how to do that.
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Black and White Printing

Feb 242011
 

This is where the problem of outsourcing comes up.  A customer (Mr. Jones) buys a large print through Fotomoto.  It has always been a tricky print to do, but I have done it at larger sizes without a problem.  But Mr. Jones is unhappy with the print and lets me and Fotomoto know.  Actually, Fotomoto, in terms of dealing with issues is quite good.  They tell the Jones that they are cc’ing me on the email.

They ask Jones to take a picture of the image which he does, but frankly it’s of no use.  He would have to be a great photographer to make a great picture of what he received.  So as a general rule – that’s not going to help me.  I don’t think it helps much taking pictures of pictures to show that there is no detail in the black (for example).  Unless you’re a professional, you’ll just wind up with a bunch of glare from the customer’s flash.

I tell the customer to send me the Fotomoto print, and if it really is messed up, which it probably is, whether it’s my fault or the printers, I’ll make a print myself to send to him.

The problem is – with black and white prints especially – I think I really do have to see them before they go to the customer.  I thought that might be an issue but I was hoping that it would be solved in the first quarter which I don’t quite see happening yet.

Now have there been a bunch of returns?  No.  I’ve sold about 35 prints and had two complaints.  One was definitely my fault because I hadn’t tested every paper yet, and it was done on the Satin which I found out later had severe color shift with the Adobe 1998 profile.  And this last one could have been a bad interpolation job on my part.  But I don’t see it in the image.

You have to understand that in ten plus years of selling prints, I may have had three returned for one reason or another.  But the “thank you” notes for the “wonderful print” far outweigh those.

The issue is that I don’t know how many customers weren’t really blown away by the prints they got but didn’t say anything.  I’ll never really know.

And as I say – black and white printing – it is a very subtle thing.

You can do fantastic things having it printed on Ilford light sensitive fiber paper and exposed by LEDs – but it is quite expensive.  I can’t make a profit having prints done that way.  Not now anyway.  Maybe if I got some sort of big prize and could double my prices…

I can’t print every single image I offer at every size.  And even if it looked correct on my paper – currently Exhibition F Gloss or Crane/Museo Silver Rag – that doesn’t tell me how it will look on the Kodak C-print Endura.

I’m starting to fear that this may be a showstopper.  Oh, it’s all very tricky isn’t it.  Am I a nervous nelly?

I do hate to say anything negative about Fotomoto because I knew what I was getting into when I began this experiment; and I had tested outsourcing with other places and wasn’t happy unless they were printing on the same paper / ink combination I was using.

Again.  The problem was – that was always too expensive and ate up my profit.  I used West Coast Imaging for the really large prints and they always did a great job but they took a long time to do the turnaround (about what it takes me) and again – it was pretty costly.

Well, I’m going to sleep on it.   I really do hate to give up on the Fotomoto solution because it is so promising.  Print turnaround went from three weeks to three days.  It’s not like every customer complained that used the Lustre paper.  But really – it doesn’t have the umph that my own prints have and my own prints have sold because of word-of-mouth.

I gotta think this out again.

Now – to see how wrong I was, and how many assumptions I made, read what happens next. Pretty astounding solution..

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