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
2) Check out the page title (very important) not only for the home page, but for all the pages
3) Meta tags are not really used very much – but the DESCRIPTION META TAG is super important as it will hold the text that is displayed in the search results (usually)
4) Google is basically a popularity contest. On top of the content that you have on your site and how keyword phrases are used, they are looking at the links that come to your site AND the quality of those inbound links. It’s not enough to have someone promise a hundred links to your site if they come from pages that Google doesn’t consider to be related to your subject. As a matter of policy – I haven’t used link farms at all. If I honestly like a site, I will link to it. I don’t want to send people off to links that have nothing to do with what my site is about. And generally, I don’t even ask for a reciprocal link. If another photographer reads this and wants to link to it – great. But I generally won’t trade links.
5) Another issue for photographers is that it is common for them to use Photography Sites. I’m not going to mention any names, but even when you have your own domain name, and are hosted on a service that has many photographers, it’s unusual to have complete control over the names of your links, and pages and titles etc. In other words, the actual words in the URL make have meaning to the ROBOT that searches your site.
On my own site, there are galleries and individual pages with images.
Here’s an example of a gallery link: http://www.beckermanphoto.com/category/new-york-city-photography
I’m not sure whether it’s better to separate the words with hyphens or underscores but a real SEO expert could tell you.
Here’s an example of a link to a page with a photo: http://www.beckermanphoto.com/blurred-turnstile.html
The point is that they aren’t filled with numbers or the actual service name or anything that could throw off the search engine.
I think this is a good start. Part two will cover actual content and the relationship to your keyword phrases and some other stuff like the “title” tag and the “alt” tag and whether
they matter.
I am a digital marketing executive for LocalEdge Media a division of Hearst Media. We sell SEO and SEM and we do it very well. What amazes me is the number of web designers who don’t really have a clue about SEO. Most of their sites either have no keywords or unrelated words.
Robert – oh, the stories I could tell you. It’s one thing when the site owner / photographer doesn’t understand SEO, it’s another when they pay for a design that can only hurt them with SEO. In the next section I’m going to propose some other basics because frankly, the average fine art photographer simply isn’t in the position to pay for this sort of thing and I’ve been at it long enough to have picked up what works. But I’m no expert – so feel free to follow along and offer corrections if you see I’ve gone way out there :)
Robert sells SEO…Dave, you give it away for free, like everything else you know…It’s high time you start to cash in off of all of your expertise…
As if you’ll listen to me…
These entries of yours about selling art over the internet are fascinating, except when you start getting technical and then my eyes glaze over and my attention reverts back to the Mets game. There is an underlying issue here, which you’ve dealt with extensively before, and that is – what is the demand for photographic art work? I would imagine, though I cetainly don’t know for sure, that the demographics break down like this:
1) The artist, or artistic, who create art themselves and follow you on your blog and Facebook. You probably get a good number of sales from these followers, but barely enough to keep the furnace burning through the winter.
2) The cosmoplitan, but amateur home decorator, who is looking for hip ways to dress up his or her apartment or place of business. That person would typically be searching for a Beckerman-type NYC photo on the internet, not knowing who you are at first.
3) The conscientious gift-giver, who will actively seek out a unique gift for a friend or loved one, especially if the intended recipient falls into one of the two categories above.
4) The great unwashed, the vast majority of teeming humanity who might never considering buyng a fairly expensive piece of artwork and would much rather spend their money on a video game or a Yankees ticket.
You obviously are targeting people in the first three groups, thinking that the last group is simple unreachable. The question is – will you ever be able to make a lot of money trying to get your product out to this limited audience? I heard that Kate MIddleton’s mother made a fortune creating and selling gift baskets for special occasions. I don’t know if she was an advertising or marketing genius, but somehow I doubt it. I think it just turned out that an amazingly large number of people wanted gift baskets. There was a vast potential demand for gift baskets that Kate Middleton’s mother stumbled into in the same way that light gets sucked into a black hole.
It’s sad to say, but I think gift baskets are far more saleable items than photographic works of art, especially in the era of cell phone cameras, where everyone and their grandmothers have become a street photographers, putting their art up daily in the great gallery of Facebook. Unless you can make a name for yourself in the rarified world of high art, it seems to me that it is a very difficult thing to sell on the web. The real money is with the very rich, who invest in works of art, or in the great unwashed, who demand gift baskets for Mother’s Day.
It became clear to me, and this was part of moving my printing to Fotomoto at the start of the year, that selling photography on the web would never, on it’s own provide for me and my cat.
I am working on a very “commercial writing” project that I can’t talk about because it’s all proprietary, and will be at for the next six months at least.
At the same time, I am making the blog begin to pay by making it less personal and more informational. Sorry about that – but my extensive knowledge turns out to be worth much more than any photograph I might post here (in fact I’ve moved the photography to it’s own category and kept it off this front page). Google Adsense really doesn’t pay for showing photographs of Central Park.
I was very idealistic when I began. I wanted to offer high quality work at reasonable prices so that anyone could afford it. That kept me and the cat alive in NYC for a decade – but as I get older – and have more experience under my belt – I see that it is people with disposable income that buy large prints, and corporations that want to make their space “classy.” It’s a bit like the Sutton line about why he robbed banks – because that’s where the money is.
[...] Search Engine Optimisation For Photographers – A nice concise tutorial from a photographer who runs his own site covering keywords, links and phrases to consider and use when thinking about SEO for your own site. [...]