SEO for Photographers Part II

SEO for Photographers Part I covered a lot of the basics, and how to work with what you’ve got. In terms of SEO, I am focused not on how to cram keywords into your page so that you rank high for them, but to help you understand what users are looking for and to figure out how to hit your end goal: getting users to your site.

Content first, SEO second

Always, ALWAYS think about the end user and how he or she wants to look at your site. The search engine should never be your number one audience. Sure, the search engine can help you get to that end user, but what happens when that user gets to your page? Will he or she be driven away by the unreadable content? By the obvious keyword stuffing? By the lack of good navigation?

Search engines are getting smarter, and this means that they’re being taught to think like a user. Websites that are usable and accessible are being rewarded with higher ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages). If you use header and subheader (H1, H2, H3) tags on your website and blog, you’re showing the search engine that you are trying to organize your content in a way that’s helpful to the user. That’s why these sorts of things are factored into SE’s algorithms – good titles, alternative text on images for screen readers, and other techniques that improve usability and accessibility will also be the places that you’ve heard you should place key words and phrases.

So what does that mean? Don’t focus on key words? Not at all – just think about how they’ll be helpful to your audience. The structure of your pages, the navigation through your site, the amount of content on your pages and their freshness are all things that will help someone consume your site – AND will help search engines understand what your pages are about. Thinking this way (and not about how you can rank high for keywords) is what will get you to the top.

Here are some things to think about:

• Sitemaps. Have you ever made one? This is a great way to figure out what buckets of pages you have and whether or not you have a cohesive site. Creating it and submitting it to search engines is great for SEO.
• The title of each page in the browser. Is it different for every page, which would help the user understand what that individual page is about? Same goes for the description of each page.
• The organization of each page. Is there a clear, unique title on your page in an H1 tag? Does it succicntly describe what’s on that page? Do you have the content on your page broken into subsections, and do those subsections have H2 subtitles?
• Navigation to other pages. Is your navigation easy to use? Does it accurately (and succinctly) describe what’s on the other pages? Do you list related pages that the user might want to check out?

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many ways of making your website usable and accessible. Read up on usability testing – maybe ask some friends to try out your site to see if they run into any roadblocks or are left with unanswered questions. Ask your clients if they thought any information on the website was missing or confusing. Check your web analytics to see what pages have the shortest “time on page” or bounce rate and see how they can be better improved to provide useful information. All of these things will improve your site, and search engines will take notice.

Search volume

Yes, we’re all going to end up picking keywords and phrases after all of that is done. So where do we start? Here’s an example: in terms of search volume, “wedding photographers” is searched for more than “wedding photographer”. Examining search trends is important in determining what keywords you optimize your site for, as it will help you get more traffic to your page. Researching now will save you a lot of time later.

Put yourself in their shoes

Think about the newly engaged couple – are they searching for a “unique wedding photographer” or a “list of Virginia wedding photographers”? Are they searching for “amazing details and real moments” (sorry, [b]ecker) or “destination photographer”? Optimizing your site for “emotional”, “candid” and other adjectives for you and your work may not be the best place to put your resources. It’s more likely that a couple is searching by location (city, state, and venue names) with some form of the word “photography”. Keep this in mind when blogging – it’s always good to repeat your locations and venues in your posts and images’ alt tags.

Clean code

Is your code clean? Have you ever run it through the W3C Markup Validation service? How about your CSS and Javascript? What would people see on your site if they had images or Java disabled? Have you ever checked out what your site looks like on other browsers?

These are a lot of questions, huh? Accessibility and continuity across platforms is a major struggle for many visual artists, since we don’t have the simplicity of just displaying text. Check your web analytics to see what types of browsers and operating systems people are using to visit your site, as well as their screen size and other factors. If your site is unusable for a certain demographic (damn you, IE6 users! Upgrade already!) then you have an opportunity to improve it. Working out these issues will certainly help users stick around on your site, if not increase your ranking on SERPs.

In Sum

This may be sort of hard to hear. You’ve spent lots of time optimizing your site for keywords and now you’re realizing that search engines don’t just look at them anymore. There are so many factors and the algorithms keep changing – that’s why following the guidelines above will help you no matter what. In the long run, you will be rewarded for having a usable and accessible site, whether it’s by search engines or your end users.