Link Ideas for Photographers Building Search Rank

You read the importance of links to your photography website, so you know that getting links can help your photo site hit the top of Google search. This post covers some more advanced tips when establishing links for the purpose of search engine optimization. I like to start with the do’s, because if you only read part of the post, at least you can take away the key things to get started DOing. Before I tell you these wonderful tips, note that they are not listed in any order of importance (I only have so much time). And VERY IMPORTANT – create a document that tracks your link building activity. You will forget who you contacted to request links, you will forget usernames and passwords for communities, and you will want to know later which links actually showed up. Okay, we can proceed with the link building tips…

Top Link Building Activites for Photographers – Do These

Build Links Over Time

Remember that document I strongly suggested two seconds ago? Use that to plan out the links that you want ahead of time. In fact, Photographer’s SEO Book has a nice little starter list of links you should go for. By planning out a link strategy you can focus on critical links first, plan your keywords relative to the site where the link will exist, and most importantly you are telling Google that you are not “spammy”. Guess what will happen if you get 50 links in one day, and then no new links for the next month. You may rank high for one day, then disappear into oblivion, or you may even get blacklisted (probably not). The point is that search engines value sites more that have a consistent stream of activity, whether it be fresh content or links coming into the website.

Buy the Photographer’s SEO Book

I’m the author, so of course you should purchase this step-by-step guide for improving your search rank. If you are a beginner to SEO or are using a photography website template, this ebook will give you a background in search engine optimization, help you find the right key phrase to optimize for (extremely important before building links), gives you cut and paste meta data and splash page text.

Build Profiles in Photographer Communities

Do a search to find forums and communities for photography or your specialty and start a profile. Put your website in your profile and in your signature (remember to use quality anchor text, and different anchor text in each forum). Every time you participate in the community with a post – your name will link to your profile (which will link to your site) and your signature will link to your site. All of these links and you only set it up once. You will get great value from your new network at the same time.

Link from Photography Directories and Local Sites

Grab the low hanging fruit by submitting your site to free directories, local search sites, and business listings. Not only does it take on average less than 5 minutes to setup these profiles, but sometimes they appear at the top of search results and can outrank your existing site (like Google Local or Yelp). Be prepared to get contacted by some of these sites that want you to upgrade or buy advertising, so setup a unique email address for those listings. The amount that these listings help your search rank is not overwhelming, so take this into consideration and don’t spend huge chunks of time on this step.

Link from High Page Rank PAGES

Lots of people know about PageRank (PR), which is a Google indicator of how important a page is on a scale of 1-10 (you can see PR with Google Toolbar from toolbar.google.com). The point is that Google does not value all links equally and your task is to get links from pages that matter. A link to your site from New York Times (high page rank) is more valuable for your search optimization than a link from a friend’s blog. It is not worth any effort to be linked from a page that has zero PageRank. Typically this is because Google does not find the page valuable (and can sometimes devalue who it links to) and search engines rarely crawl those pages to even see the links and give your site credit. The problem I see most often is that photographers find a site with a high PageRank homepage, and think they are getting value from a link from deep inside this site. Remember it is the PAGE where your link will appear where you want to check the PageRank. It takes many links from PR 1 and 2 pages to start impacting your search rank, but only a few links from PR 5+ pages to see a noticeable change.

Link to Deep Pages

Search engines do not like controlled activity. An example of this is you going out and trying to control your rank by establishing a bunch of links to your homepage. In reality, the most popular sites will have real users linking to many different pages of the site, and not just the homepage. Impress Google by mimicing human nature and link to subpages of your site. Link to your photo galleries, link to your photography blog. When link building it is best to link to multiple pages of your site so that search engines do not interpret your new links as spam-like.

Vary the Anchor Text

Search engines look at the words in the hyperlink (called anchor text) to understand what the website will be about. It values these words more than the words that are on the site itself, because these words span many other websites and are less likely to be manipulated. It is very important to use highly searched keywords within the links that point to your website. For example my blog might have a link to my main website that says “San Diego Wedding Photographer” instead of “www.mydomain.com” because I want Google to know my site is about San Diego wedding photography. If you read the previous tip, you will understand that the normal process of linking would not produce the same anchor text in all of the links pointing to a site, so change your keywords slightly from link to link to “act natural.” This will also help you rank for similar keywords that users might be searching.

Be Cautious Of These Link Activities

Avoid Tons of Outbound Links

Google’s algorithm takes into account how many links come into a page versus how many link out from a page. It gets very complex. You can still have links to valuable content that lives outside of your site, but should not have a long list of run on links that are not valuable to your audience because it can slightly penalize you in search results. Choose your link partners wisely, and by all means avoid creating a page (or series of pages) that link off to a bunch of unrelated websites.

No Follow means No Value

Sites can put a little snippet of code into the HTML of a link tag called nofollow that tells a search engine not follow the link from this site. Basically saying – do not pass along link value from the site and do not help the destination site in search rank. Blogger comments, flickr forums, and wikipedia external links are examples that use nofollow tags to discourage link builders from commenting or posting materials for the purposes of SEO instead of adding valuable content. If you plan to request a link from a directory, partner, or want to add a comment with your link in it, view the source of the page to make sure there are not any instances of nofollow in the HTML code. Otherwise your link will not help you in your quest to improve rank.

Automatic Link Submission = SPAM

Avoid any offers that suggest you can get hundreds or thousands of links in a single submission. This will most certainly be seen by search as spam and get your site blacklisted from appearing in search results. I know it seems tempting, but you know it is too good to be true. Don’t jeopardize your brand.

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are losing momentum quickly. An example is “you link to me and I will link to you.” I think there is some value with your core group of photography partners, especially if all the links are from homepages, but definitely don’t create a links page or request links to your site from anyone else’s links pages. In the best circumstance it just wastes your time, but in the long run it can be penalizing.

Paid Links

You do not need to pay for links, nor does paid link advertising help your organic search results. I’m not saying that Google Ad Sense is not valuable (I think it is in a lot of cases). I am saying you should not be paying for directory listings (the only ones even close to consideration are business.com, yahoo.com and joeant.com). You can still achieve a high rank without renting links from high PageRank pages. And you should definitely never pay into a program that promises tens or hundreds of links. Especially if you are beginner, try everything you can first and see what happends to your results before you begin investing, because you will learn a lot in the process that will save you dollars later.

For example, the Photographer’s SEO Book for $39 is worth the price just for telling you what key phrase to focus on. Because if you focus on the wrong phrase, all of your link building my be giving you credit for something that you can’t rank for, or that users are not searching for.

Tagged as: Link Building, SEO Tips