PDNPulse: PhotoPlus Seminar: Boosting Your Web Site's Search Engine Rankings

Blake Discher says the second thing he does when he gets up in the morning is a Google search on “Detroit photographer” to make sure his site comes up first in the search results. If it doesn’t, he tweaks the site to re-establish his king-of-the-hill status. His seminar, "Is Your Web Site Doing All It Can to Make You Money?" was all about how to put your own site at the top of search engine rankings. The technical term for it, by the way, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

“If your site is not optimized for search engines, you’re losing business and leaving money on the table,” he said.

The critical element, he explained, is selecting a keyword phrase that potential customers are likely to search on, then embedding that keyword phrase strategically in the body copy and meta-data of your web site so search engines keep finding it.

“Figure out what people type in to find a photographer that does what you do,” he said, and use that as your meta-data keyword phrase. “They’re likely to type in photographer, location, and specialty.” (The best keyword phrase, by the way, isn’t your name unless you’re famous).

Discher asks everyone who calls how they found him, and what keywords they used if they found him through a search engine. Another strategy: “Access your web site logs” to see what search terms people are using, he says. And analyze the sites of competitors—especially those whose sites rank higher than yours—to see what keyword phrases they’re using.

Commercial photographers should optimize their Web site for Google, because corporations use that search engine, Discher says. Wedding and portait shooters should optimize for Yahoo, he advised, because consumers tend to use that search engine more.

So how do you optimize your site for a particular search engine? He lays it out in detail on a Web site called go-seo.com, in a downloadable document. He announced the access password at the seminar, but I think he’d kill me if I repeated it here.

But there is optimization software you can buy that will analyze your site, tell you exactly what to do (and how to do it) to make your site come up higher in search results. Discher recommended software called Web Position, which costs about $200 and is “worth every penny,” he says. (Unfortunately it comes only in a PC version)

In addition, Discher offered dozens of tips for Google SEO, so here I dump my notes for the benefit of those who are curious:

--Most important are incoming links to your site. The more you have, the higher your site ranks. Get other relevant (ie, photo industry sites) to link to your site. Exchange links with other photographers. Start a blog (separate from your web site), and make sure the first words on the blog are your keyword phrase. Comment on industry forums and blogs, leaving your web address every time.

--Get the URL that’s your keywording phrase, if you can. (eg, www.detroit-photographer.com)

--Search engines favor bigger sites, so make yours with many pages. Every time a visitor clicks on something, have your site open a new page. And include your keyword phrase in the file name for each page.

--Make sure the description tag in your Web site homepage starts with your keyword phrase.

--Search engines rank your site lower if visitors use the “back” button to return to the search results—and then go to another site. So make sure visitors don’t hit the back button: make your navigation intuitive, Make your pages load fast, and…

--Make your site “sticky” to keep visitors engaged. For instance, make your content attractive, make it fresh, post games, contests, white papers with valuable information that will bring traffic (and cause other sites to set up incoming links. eg, “How to shoot good travel photographs” may spur incoming links from travel agencies)

--Make sure you update your Web site frequently, because infrequent updates cause your site to fall in the rankings. Post features such as “Picture of the Day,” or change the JPEG compression of a static image (to make the search engine crawlers think it’s a new picture), or simply change the size of your home page frequently.

--Make it easy for visitors to bookmark your page by simply clicking a “bookmark this page” link. Google extracts bookmark files from the computers of anyone doing a search, so if your site is in a lot of peoples’ bookmark file, that will help boost your site ranking.

--Upload your sitemap using Google and Yahoo sitemap tools. That makes it easy for the search engines to access your site.

--Make sure there are no dead links on your site, because Google (for one) penalizes you in search engine results for dead links. Search on google for link checkers, and run your URL through them regularly to clean out dead links.

--If your home page features a Flash module (and a lot of sites do these days) make sure there is text somewhere on the page that search engine crawlers can see (they can’t see very well inside Flash sites, at least not yet, and they can’t get in through your pull down menu links). Discher puts links to his inside pages—a linked sitemap, in effect—at the bottom of his home page so the web crawlers can see behind the Flash module.

-- Even better than two way-reciprocal links—where photographers link to each other on their Web sites—are one-way incoming links (search engines consider them more credible). One-way incoming links from .edu domains count the most. (Put your two-way links where customers can’t see your competitors names)

--Put “link bait” on your site--content on your site that other people will link to. Discher has “pricing pages” that some photography schools have linked to, giving him one-way links from .edu domains, he says

--use big headline tags to highlight your keyword phrase in your body copy, so it looks really big and important to search engines (but override the large font with your cascading style sheets so that site visitors see the keyword phrase as as normal part of the copy)

--The first 200 words of body copy are critical, the next 400 word are important.

--Make your menu bar word graphical—create them as GIF files—so the first words that the search engine sees is your keyword phrase, rather than menu options such as “portfolio” or “contact me.”

Discher delivered plenty more tips at a rapid fire pace. If you attended this seminar, you certainly got your money’s worth.

Posted by David Walker on October 24, 2008 at 3:42 PM
Categories: Blogs , Business , Multimedia , Self-Promotion , Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (4)