As a photographer, with all that post photography workflow, it gets hard keep up with other criteria like good website ranking and online presence. SEO is one such path through which one can take their business to next level.
This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO—from finding the terms and phrases to making your site friendly to search engines and marketing the unique value of your site.
If you are confused about this stuff, you are not alone, and we’re here to help.
Basics of SEO
1. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing non-paid search engine results including both the technical and creative elements which are as and when required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. It isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites but about making your site better for people too.
2. Why does your website need SEO?
As most of the web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! It becomes very vital for your business to have a growth with SEO too. Search engines are unique as they provide targeted traffic that people looking for what you offer. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.
Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make or break an organization’s success as targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity and exposure like no other kind or method of marketing. So, leading more visitors to your site, and increasing more sales or clients you need to rank well with relevant keywords.
Although social media and other platforms can surely generate traffic for your website, but search engines remain the primary method of navigation for most of the internet users. Think it in this way that whenever you come across finding something or discovering anything, you end up searching it in the search engine. You obviously want that all the provisions you are presenting to the audience gets easily to them by just a simple search.
Processing and analyzing all these basic requirements of boosting your opportunities, you need to have a SEO for your website.
3. Indexing & Ranking
The search engines have two functions i.e. building an index and providing search users with a ranked list of the relevant websites. Once a search engine processes all the crawled pages, it compiles a huge index of all the words and their location on each page, essentially creating a database of billions of web pages. This is then stored, organized and interpreted by the search engine’s algorithm to state its importance.
Now is the most concerned part of SEO which also shows the visibility of the process. Once a keyword is searched, the search engines check for pages within their index that are the closest match; assigning a score to these pages based on an algorithm of different ranking signals. These pages are then displayed to the user in order of score.
For your site to rank well in search results pages, it is important to make sure search engines can crawl and index your site correctly or else they will be unable to appropriately rank your website’s content.
4.Setting up the stages
There are many factors that affect the stage you will be performing and how affective it is going to be. You need to be very careful on what you choose as your prop and everything else.
Your website is your reception on the internet. When setting up your photography website, you need to consider some technicalities and the structure of your site before you add content.
- Firstly, decide which platform you’re going to use to build your website. As long as your final product is outstandingly good, they care less about which platform you have used. In general, you can make adjustments to the key components; you’ll probably be able to rank just fine.
- Having separate site for blog and another for the basic site was common with photographers for many years, but as the technology has changed, it is no longer necessary to split them if you are using one of the good platforms. Your blog should be in your site on the same domain with any other content.
- Make sure you have only one website as it is very hard to make a manageable optimization is both the sites. One of the most important ranking factors is the number of backlinks of your websites.
- Be consistent with your domain name as it is the thing that people pass among themselves and if it keeps changing, your site will face difficulties targeting the ranks.
- Don’t block search engines as it creates a problem when things run by default. It is seen that many of the photographers unintentionally block Google from indexing which can be blunder. Have a double check on it.
- Target on making a responsive and fast website loading as it is the first impression of the audience.
- Structure of the site should be organized, and the content should be well put together to make it look smooth and flowing. You don’t want it to be bizarre for the audience to make it look less accessible.
5.Keyword Usage and Targeting
Keywords are fundamental to the search process. They are the building blocks of language and of search & the entire science of getting information are based on keywords. If, you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results for “dog,” it’s wise to make sure the word “dog” is part of the content of your document. The keywords make your site to crawl through other sites, get indexed and put better rankings to your business.
Come up with a few words or phrases that you can enter the various research tools available. This is important to note that sometimes people don’t use the same words that you may use to describe what you do. So, try starting with the most words you can relevantly get in your mind as a photographer like photography, lenses, editing and so on. Make a list of these words. Keep it simple in the start. Then merge your keywords to a voluminous content to make it represent able in your content. Then keep finding keywords that people use. Keep up with the competitors and the keywords they incorporate in their website. Now at last plan your content accordingly.
What exactly is On-Page SEO?
Online it is a noisy marketplace. So how you optimize your online presence to make your voice heard starts with ensuring an up to date on-page SEO. It is the basics to provide a peak performance for your website and an online visibility of the same for your target audience.
Literally, ‘on-page SEO’ is the practise of optimising the content on your website so that it can be found by search engines, like Google or Bing or Yahoo! As an overview ‘Optimising the content’ can include tasks like adding keywords to your headers and body text, specifically placing keywords in the correct locations on your page & using images within your content. Also making sure your content is readable is one of the points that come in this part of SEO. Page titles and URL optimisation, and the list are longer than this.
On-page SEO is monitoring individual web pages to rank higher and earn more traffic in or through search engines. It refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page.
It has been changing over the years, so it becomes very important to keep up with the latest practices and when you have only about eight seconds to influence a visitor to interact with your website this becomes even more important. The more engagement & the longer your users stay on the site, the better their experience. This can be achieved only by a good On-Page Optimisation.
- Building blocks for the content
- Start by applying your keyword research
On-page optimization allows you to turn your research into content your audience will love. As content is the most important part of SEO, make relevant content to your keywords. For a photographer, the relevant keywords can be around ‘photography’, ‘portraits’, ‘lenses’, ‘post-photography’ , ‘editing’, ‘cameras’, ‘gears’, and loads more.
Survey for your keywords and classify them according to the similar topics and intent. These grouping will help you build more pages and increasing the content ratio of the page too.
While thinking about the keyword to write about, ask yourself that what unique value could you offer to make your page better than the pages and more productive those are currently ranking for my keyword. Answering this will help you brainstorm more on this and make better content.
- Avoid any kind of low standards.
Content should not be created solemnly for ranking highly in search alone but being to help searchers with a wider perspective. Below are some of the points to remember while judging the quality of your content.
- Thin content with no much detailing can be of bizarre when a searcher is expecting more information.
- Duplicate content is the most degrading kind of content that can destroy your website. Just avoid copying from anywhere.
- Cloaking & Keyword stuffing should again be laid good attention to.
- Auto-generated content is the kind of content that gets generated when you put some stock image or anything that you have officially taken from somewhere.
- Other optimizations that your page needs
1. Header tags
Each page should have a unique H1 that describes the main topic of the page; this is often the title of a page. Header tag can be used by H1 to H6 tags in the website. The main descriptive title of the page should contain that page’s primary keyword or phrase in H1 header. Also avoid using header tags to mark up the elements that aren’t as important as titles, such as navigational buttons or phone numbers.
2. Internal links
A part of any website’s ability to crawl lies in its internal linking structure. When the other pages are linked to your website, you ensure that search engine crawlers can find all your site’s pages passing ranking power to other pages on your site. This ensures you help visitors to navigate your site.
3. Image optimization
If your web page is slow in loading that is primarily because of low image optimisation. The best way to solve is to compress your images. Another way to help optimize your images and improve your page speed by choosing the right image format that fits perfectly to your site.
4. Title tags
Each page on your website should have a unique, descriptive title tag. A page’s title tag is a descriptive, HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. You need to be careful while choosing your perfect title tag to make your webpage stand out.
5. Meta descriptions
Like title tags, meta descriptions are again HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on often helping to improve descriptions for unique searches. However, don’t let this deter you from writing a default page meta description as they’re still extremely valuable by carefully picking the perfect words for your webpage’s description.
- Naming and organizing your pages- Another important element of On Page Optimisation
Like title tags and meta descriptions, search engines display URLs. URLs are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web so naming and formatting them can impact the click-through rates. Searchers not only use them to make decisions about which web pages to click on, but also used by search engines to evaluate and rank pages. The following points to consider while organizing your pages.
- Clear page naming helps to display your pages in search results. It also is helpful for people who are trying to understand what your URL is about. The search engines require unique URLs for each page on your website so be careful enough while naming.
- Page organization is necessary if you are discussing multiple topics on your website. You should also avoid nesting pages under irrelevant folders as it can confuse not only the audience but also you as the owner. Be careful while classifying.
- URL length is not necessary to have a completely flat URL structure. As many click-through rate studies indicate that searchers often prefer shorter URLs. Like title tags and meta descriptions that are too long, too-long URLs will also cut off interest.
- Using keywords in URL makes your specification more precise. But don’t overdo by trying to stuff in multiple keywords just for the sake of SEO.
The important on-page SEO tips to remember while optimising a website.
1. Create SEO friendly URLs that will help your site crawl to higher ranks. If you keep consistent efforts on maintaining the SEO of your page, they will turn out to crawl super quickly towards the top.
2. Add your keyword to the title of your website or post or page so that when any searcher looks for something with that word, Google can make it easily available in the first page if you have inculcated them.
3. Make your website more engaging by using images, video and/or audio! Engagement on the website is a must. If any searcher spends more time on your site, it is because of the engaging visuals or content you have incorporated.
4. Make sure your page or post’s heading includes H1 header same as that your keyword. H1 are the most used header size to attract crawling.
5. Add outbound links to your homepage or posts that creates redirection to other pages that you want to bring to limelight.
6. Your keyword should appear in the first paragraph of anything you write. May it be a blog post or a description of your page.
7. Make sure your site has lightning fast load times because no searcher likes waiting for a page to load. Even you don’t wait long, right?
8. Make sure social sharing boxes appear on your pages or posts. This will add an essence of online presence to your page.
9. Create lots of unique content as any searcher would like to end up with loads of information if they have waited for something they have been searching for.
10. Work towards lowering your bounce rate as this is very negative for any page to make it top. Bounce rates should be kept in mind always while optimising your page.
11. Be Aware of the Google Algorithm as Google weeds out the websites with too much keyword or spamming. Just be careful about these facts.
12. Creating a site that looks the same in mobile also takes a lot of work behind the screen. Just make the website mobile friendly.
SEO is easy once you have seen and understood what it means for a website. Before you start acting on anything, make sure you have grasped all the knowledge on the factors, aspects and traits of each part of the SEO. Once, you are done with this just go and rock your photography page to set the stage on fire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR BIO:-
UShoot VEdit is a professionally photography editing services provider putting your post production services at ease. we provide editing services like retouching, enhancements, restorations, album designing and color corrections. we put all this in quickest turnaround times also ensuring a good quality. we have been in this industry for around 5 years, working hard towards excellence in coming years.
