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.
I love your work winter seascapes work, and many of the other fantastic photographs on this site. I am using you as my photographer link in my yearly photography project
thanks for the inspiration
Genevieve
some interesting points here Alex. i’m no master myself but i wish to make my content easily found for those who may be interested. a few other things:
fill out the alternate text attribute fot the html img tag (embedding from flickr does this automatically – important for photoblogs with limited text)
submit urls to search engines
get blogs listed on sites like BlogCatalog, photoblogs.org, Technorati, etc
Good advice Cain thanks for that!
Hi Alex, great post. You’ve got one minor error though – the frequency of updates doesn’t have any direct effect at all on Page Rank =)
Cheers,
Luke
Thanks for that Luke, updated accordingly.