Photography SEO Tips

I’m by no means an expert on SEO (Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion) but I want to share some lit­tle things that I’ve incor­po­rated which has helped boost my traf­fic and get my pho­tog­ra­phy out there.

Post Tags

When cre­at­ing a new post it’s impor­tant to tag the con­tent appear­ing in both Word­Press Post Tags and the All in One SEO plu­gin. Here is an exam­ple of tags used for a seascape long expo­sure pho­to­graph cap­tured at South Arm, Tas­ma­nia.  I get a small amount of traf­fic for the key­words B+W and Cokin neu­tral den­sity fil­ters so I incor­po­rate this into my tags when I’ve used either of my B+W or Cokin filters.

“South Arm, Hobart, Tas­ma­nia, Aus­tralia, seascape, water­scape, long expo­sure, B+W 110, Cokin neu­tral den­sity, nd, fil­ter, grad”

Drop Key­words

You need to decide what pop­u­lar key­words you will tar­get and then slowly work them into the con­tent of your posts. Be real­is­tic though as aim­ing to rank high for the key­words “pho­tog­ra­phy” or “wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher” isn’t going to hap­pen. Instead I try to tar­get local words like ‘Tas­ma­nia pho­tog­ra­phy’ ‘Seascape pho­tog­ra­phy’ ‘nd fil­ters’ you get the jist.

Once you’ve decided on the key­words you’re going to tar­get, begin to add them to your titles and descrip­tions where rel­e­vant. Once again don’t over do this and try to do so with­out the reader even noticing.

Perma­links

The default perma­link struc­ture isn’t great.

Default http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/?p=123

Instead change to the ‘Day and Name’ struc­ture which allows you to incor­po­rate the head­ings (key­words cough) into the post URL. This is found in the Set­tings > Perma­links menu.

Day and name http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/2009/12/01/sample-post/

Make Use of Plugins

Most of these are quite straight for­ward or are explained well on their web­sites so I won’t bore you.

• All in One SEO Pack
• Google Sitemaps
• Max Blog Ping Optimiser
• Redi­rec­tion
• Word­Press Stats
• Greet Box
• Related Posts
• Akismet

Social Media

Use social media web­sites to your advan­tage through sub­tly build­ing links to your blog. By this I mean

• Com­ment on other pho­tog­ra­phy blogs with your web­site in the URL field but don’t over do it. I get the occa­sional com­ment from peo­ple where it’s quite obvi­ously a link build­ing exer­cise and the com­ment is quickly marked as spam.
• Add your pho­tog­ra­phy link to your sig­na­ture on forums you use.
• Social media web­sites like Digg, Stum­ble Upon, Red­dit, etc can rake in huge amounts of traf­fic if you’re lucky. I sug­gest only sub­mit­ting your best arti­cles or pho­tographs as it’s not easy to hit the front page on these sites so save it for your best.

Google Web­mas­ter

Google Web­mas­ter is a handy tool that allows you to mon­i­tor any crawl errors Google encoun­tered, pop­u­lar key­words and your rank on Google, web­sites link­ing to you and sitemap diag­nos­tic tools.

As I said I’m no expert and am inter­ested to hear how you opti­mise your blog for SEO.