Comments on: SEO Tips for Photographers

By: Nick Fancher

Nick Fancher — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:09:00 +0000

Thank you for your input. Really helpful advice.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:34:00 +0000

Disavowing links is more for if someone has launched a negative campaign against you. If you do get a penalty it’ll more likely because you’re buying links, and promoting it. I think it’s best just to sit and watch your rankings. If your apparel listings drop then I think you’ll just have to take it. If you get a broader site wide penalty then you’ll have to hold your hands up and say sorry to google. Unfortunately this bit isn’t so transparant. It’s up to Google what they deem right – judge, jury and executioner. But you have a good site with good content so that’s a very good start. Site’s always shift around in the rankings especially for longer tail stuff so don’t assume a drop is a penalty straight away.

It seems you don’t link to your main site from your blog much. Perhaps try and write a few more wordy posts mentioning the keywords your going for then link to your main site, preferably to a specific page that’s relevant.

On a side note I find the tumbler theme you have a little hard to navigate. Clicking on the more button don’t change the url so it’s hard to link to specific posts. Making things easier to link to can result in more links. I.e Nick Francher has a great tutorial on linking leather apparel -> link to post. If it’s difficult people wont do it.

Anyway I’m sure I’ve gone on long enough. Good luck with the improvements to the site and I hope you get the clients you’re after.

By: Nick Fancher

Nick Fancher — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the comment. What about disavowing harmful sites that are linking to me? Isn’t that an easy fix if I get penalized?

By: wedding_greece

wedding_greece — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:24:00 +0000

Hi PR links to your site will always count no mater what…

By: wedding_greece

wedding_greece — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:22:00 +0000

Hi PR links to your site will always count no mater what…

By: seo first

seo first — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:31:00 +0000

Nice Blog. I appreciate it. It is ever changing field. You’ve got to keep self updated.

By: stanrogers

stanrogers — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:45:00 +0000

Don’t underestimate the description meta. On a text-light site (as most photographer sites tend to be), the description is what will show up below the page title in the results listing when you don’t have matching text on the page. A good description means that your results listing isn’t a generic blind link. That gets user clicks, and user clicks (tracked by default now, although a small percentage of users have installed browser plugins to remove the tracking URL conversions) are as important a part of your page’s ranking as anything else. And while the keywords meta isn’t directly used for indexing, the correspondence between keywords and content does affect the “trustworthiness” rating of a page, and if that rates high as a site average, keywords will be indexed. It’s not that the meta no longer works, it’s that misuse of the meta is more often accurately identified and punished, so if you do it wrong you’d have been better off not doing it.

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:32:00 +0000

Brave move there Nick. Any of your competitors who want your site penalized now have a reference to point Google to for proving you buy links. If your site comes up for a manual review you have no comeback as far as google is concerned. You buy links you’re in for a penalty.

I imagine your site has got a decent link profile (I haven’t checked) already so to Google those spammy links probably dilute quite well and have given you the boost for the keywords you want. But your good links are what give you the ability to pull this off. Personally I would have got them going to a page talking about the keywords they reference. Within the SEO industry it’s openly known that people buy/swap links. Some do it directly some may think of more creative ways to get a link from another site. If you do buy links I really wouldn’t shout about it and I really, really wouldn’t place a list of sites you’ve bought links from on a website. Those links will be mute soon.

I think rule number one for photographers wanting a SEO boost is make sure you have relevant text on your site. Google search are (mostly) text based. Google doesn’t know that that picture on your site is a picture of food that you took in your local town. Alt tags, descriptions, blog posts pointing to it all give these textual hints that Google needs. BTW meta keywords mean nothing. Meta descriptions don’t help you rank but are your free advert on Google – concentrate on making them inviting.

SEO is marketing, though with a heavy slant towards pleasing google. If you lean on any one of Google’s weaknesses too heavily eventually they’ll kick back and your site will suffer from it.

By: Chris Burke

Chris Burke — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:00:00 +0000

I learned a lot about SEO this summer and rebranded in the fall when I moved to a new town. I originally was name+photography.. And I still keep that domain, but I rebranded with the location name and weddings.. Because its a VERY popular place for weddings,. So my so site is all rebranded, and keywords focus on the wedding aspect.. But I also have keywords for portrait etc.. But I mostly shoot weddings..so I focus on that. And my original domain of name+photography just redirects to the new address. Learning about SEO changed my site traffic considerably!! And I bought a bunch of other similar domains that all go to it too

By: Mitch Labuda

Mitch Labuda — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:40:00 +0000

Like the SEOQuake tip.

There are all so many on the web, jockeying for better placement.

Another tool in the tool box