SEO for photographers is extremely important, especially when considering how competition is higher than ever and climbing steadily. When potential customers start thinking about hiring a photographer, one of the first things they do is a Google search. Having a well thought out social networking strategy is very important but don’t let that prevent you from overlooking the internets core ability of being able to search for information you need. If you’re not actively applying SEO techniques on a regular basis, this is one of those photography tips for business that you really need to read.

SEO for Beginners

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When you think about SEO, your goal is to optimize your website so that it ranks as high as possible for specific keywords or phrases in popular search engines, such as Google. There are basically 3 primary engines used worldwide and those are Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google holds the championship title on usage. The number of people that search Yahoo and Bing combined doesn’t even hold a match to those who use Google. We don’t want to exclude the other engines. However, you should realize that Google is your primary target. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning SEO for photographers or any other type of business.

Statistically, people tend to limit themselves to the first 3 pages of search results. There’s 10 results per page so that means your goal is to rank in the top 30 listings for your keywords. I know that sounds like a pretty tough task. However, don’t let that hold you back. Yes, you’re competing with a bazillion websites for that spot in the top 30 but as luck will have it … most people know absolutely nothing when it comes to SEO. It’s really not that hard to do.

I’m not going to dive into insane technical issues. I want to stay focused on basic SEO for photographers in general. This is a website focused on photography tips after all.

Basic SEO for Photographers

SEO Keywords & Phrases

This is your starting point. You need to know what your keywords and phrases should be before you go any further. Make yourself a list of simple questions and start tweaking it out. What do you do? Photography. What kind of Photography? Wedding Photography. Ok, where do you do most of your wedding photography? Dallas, Texas. In this case a good keyword phrase for you might be Dallas Texas Wedding Photography.

Now let’s tweak it out a bit. If you’re looking for a wedding photographer, what are you going to type into Google? People are not looking for Photography. They’re looking to hire a Photographer. So, let’s streamline our keyword phrase to Dallas Texas Wedding Photographer. Now, let’s take one more step into our consumers subconscious. Do they want to choose a Photographer or choose the best photographer from a wide selection of Photographers? Yes, Google will display different results based on singular and plural words. So, finally we have come to the conclusion to use Dallas Texas Wedding Photographers as our keyword phrase for a relevant page. You can see that all I have done is taken what I do and then created a logical search phrase for it. Make a list of keyword phrases for each specialty you have. They will come in handy as you develop new pages for your website.

P.S. I’m not really a wedding photographer in Dallas. Ok, moving on.

SEO MetaTags

Title – The Title Tag contains the information that the visitor will see in their web browsers title bar and browser tabs. This is also the string of text that will link to your website in a search engines search results. Other websites and social networks, such as Facebook, will use this information to create anchor text for links. It is very important that your keywords and phrases are within the Title Tag. This is one of the most important SEO elements on your page. Keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters of text. Make sure your title gets to the point within that limit. You also want to place important keywords as close to the beginning as possible, followed by your secondary keyword phrases.
Description – This is the text description that is displayed in search results beneath the Title link and explains what the page is all about. You need to keep this description short and to the point .. 160 characters or less. Is this important to your SEO ranking and should you strategically place keywords in the description? The common misconception is that it effects your SEO and, in fact, it does not. This is to assist user readability and nothing more. A brief description, with no keywords, but one that sparks a persons interest is best. This will increase the number of people who actually click through to your website once the page is listed in the search results. Think catchy slogan. This is why you NEED to see this page.
Keywords – These are invisible to your visitors. Search engines do not display this information in their results. The Keyword Tag is another major SEO misconception. It’s not actually that important. Don’t feel like you need to kill yourself working on Keyword Tags. Google does not even bother looking at the Keyword Tag. They really never have. This tag was, more or less, a failed experiment during the dawn of modern internet search and pre-dates Google. Yahoo does look at the tag but they don’t really give it much weight. It’s a leftover that was never taken out of the fridge and thrown away. You can use the Keyword Tag if you want. It won’t hurt you to use it but don’t waste too much time on it.

URL Structure for SEO

http://www.your-website.com/category/subcategory/page-title.html

Above you see the typical URL Structure. Some important things to look at here. First, notice the “dash” in www.your-website.com. Some people will say use underscores. Don’t do that .. anywhere. Google will see those words as one word. In my example, Google will index both words “your” and “website”. You also see the dash used in the page-title. We’re focusing on SEO for photographers so let’s say your page contains wedding photography price lists. It should look something like .. wedding-photography-price-list.html

Now let’s look at the category and subcategory. These are just like folders on your computer and they need to make sense. It’s a path that leads to the final page. Placing relevant keywords and phrases in these is very important. A couple examples of something photographs might use would be ..

/wedding-photography/wedding-services/wedding-photography-price-list.html
/wedding-photography/wedding-galleries/dallas-texas-wedding-photographers.html

Body Text

Now for the actual body text. When you’re writing the text for a page, post, article, etc., you need to be using relevant keywords and phrases for that page. There are a few tricks that will boost the SEO for those keywords on the page.

Try to use your keyword or phrase in a Header 1, 2 & 3 Tags. (i.e. <H1>Photography Tips</H1>). Those are normally the 3 largest fonts seen on the page. In this article you can see a perfect example of how I have used the phrase, SEO for Photographers, in all three header types.
Use the keyword phrase in both the first and last sentence of your body text. Again, you can find SEO for Photographers at both the beginning and end of the body text on this page.
Use Bold, Italic & Underline text on the keywords. I don’t use underline because it potentially confuses visitors with a link. I also only do this once per page. You should be getting the idea now. Pay close attention and you’ll find the phrase SEO for photographers in bold and italic print toward the top of this article.
Use your keyword phrase a few times throughout the body text. There is no real magic number of times to do this. Think more about making a connection with your audience and less about the search engines. You will often hear people talking about “Keyword Density” and even popular SEO Software will help you calculate this. I’ll briefly explain it simply because it’s another web myth. The Density rule states that your keyword should account for an average of 4% of your body text. Not true. If you’re spending a lot of time trying to streamline your text for a perfect 4% .. Stop. I’ve had posts hit #1 on Google that had a 0.5 percent.

Image File SEO for Photographers

This is something that practically every photographer I’ve talked to never does. When you’re getting a photo ready for your website do you give it a special name or leave it as something like DSC_9873.JPG? Google will see this as DSC9873, which makes no sense at all. What if you named it something like dallas-texas-wedding-photographers-9873.JPG … ahhhh now you get it. Use those keywords everywhere you can.

ALT Tag SEO

While we’re on the subject of photos, what do your ALT tags look like? Make sure you are using your keywords and phrases in your images ALT tags. However, we don’t need to worry about dashes in these cases.

SEO for Photographers – Quick Tips

Don’t use your photography business name at the beginning of your page titles. You’ll be wasting valuable SEO real estate. If people are searching for you by business name then odds are they’re going to find you anyway. Get those keywords in your Header 1, 2 & 3 Tags. Don’t forget to use a bold and italic font on keywords. Think about naming your files before uploading them to your page and don’t forget about the ALT Tags. One last thing. Don’t forget to throw your keywords in the first and last sentence. For example, I hope you all learned some good stuff in this article about SEO for Photographers.