By SEO is probably a term that makes a photographer cringe. Why?! Well, for starters the term depicts a certain amount of difficulty especially for photographer’s whose dominant characteristic is their creativity, since SEO is more on technical aspect of things, some photographers might find it time consuming, difficult or boring. To sum it up, SEO is search engine optimization. A process in which you optimize either your website, videos, local listing and images to gain ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, this is for your business to gain traffic and be expose to millions of people who are using the internet. So how can a photographer do SEO? What are the things that needs to be focused on?
Domain Registration
Make sure that your domain is registered for a long time. If your domain is registered for a long time, search engines especially Google see this as a commitment. You are showing them that you are sincerely committed to your business and will have it for a long time. As a result they will add your website to their list of sites that are not deemed as spam, which will give you a great chance of ranking high on search results for your targeted keywords.
Site Speed
We all know that photography websites involve photographs right?! (See what I did there J) And images, especially high resolution ones tends to make site heavy thus making the website sluggish and takes time to load on a user’s browser. And the results of this is that your visitor will likely hit the back button and find another websites that is similar to yours. So to avoid this, you need to compress your images without losing their quality. Here are some websites that might help you on this.
- jpegmini.com
- tinypng.com
- compressnow.com
- shrinkpictures.com
- jpeg-optimizer.com
- jpegreducer.com
Title and Alt Text on Images
Often times as a website owner we just upload the images to the site, add it to our post and we’re done (admit it you have done this more than once. J ). But what we don’t know is that, there are simple things that we just need to add to our images and it will have a higher chance of showing up on search results for our target keyword. And these are adding an Image Title and alt text. You need to add image title and alt text for the search engines to easily understand what the image is all about. If you don’t know how to add these attributes on your website and if you are running a wordpress site, the image below will help you out.
Reach out
Backlinks is still considered as one of the most important ranking factor used by search engines such as Google to rank websites whether they admit it or not. Gaining backlinks is not that hard, the difficult part is gaining a quality backlink. So how can you gain such backlink? Reach Out! Yes, reach out to your fellow photographers, find websites that are similar to yours, offer them a guest post in which you write a quality article or create an infographic and in return you can have 1-2 backlinks from their site to yours. Sounds easy right?! To further help you on finding such sites here are some search terms you can put on Google’s search bar:
Conclusion
SEO for a photographer is not that hard, you just need to have a little patience and do abide with Google’s guidelines so you don’t have to worry on having penalties on whatever updates they introduce. For a more comprehensive and in-depth guide, check out this article: SEO for Photographers: A Beginner’s Guide
