Search Engine Tips for Photography Blogs

In my Photographer’s SEO Book, I give photographers step-by-step instructions for setting up a blog on WordPress. But as a photographer, first you need to understand why a blog can be so incredibly beneficial to your business. Specifically the search engine rank a blog can provide your business. After optimizing photographer websites for many years, I see photographers overlook the creation of a blog site. For the few that do have blogs, they definitely were not created with search engines in mind. Please take away from this article that a blog is free, quick and easy to create, and can often outpace your business website in search engines! Before setting up your blog make sure to read the article Photographers Need Links to Rank in Search Engines.

A blog is like an online journal where each individual entry (or post) is automatically converted to a webpage. More webpages means a better chance of showing up in search engines. Blogging is as free and simple as emailing.

Benefits of a Blog for Photographers

The first major benefit of a blog is that it’s an additional website that can potentially rank in search engines. Just like your photography business website has the chance to rank in Google and send you valuable project leads, a blog can do the same thing. Imagine having two websites that both rank, either for the same term or different terms. In either case, that is double the new customers for your business. Did I mention that blogs are low maintenance? You can have a blog site created in under an hour and can edit pages yourself and without a web developer. Where else can you create a fast and easy site, without any financial investment? Even if your blog doesn’t rank in Google, you can use it as a way to keep customers informed on your latest projects, testimonials, images, and events. Many of my photographer friends use their blog writing as a monthly newsletter to friends and clients.

Search engines look at blog sites more often, meaning they can appear more quickly in search results! Search engines give a high ranking to sites with lots of links pointing to it, great keywords, and are updated often. Blogs by nature have all 3 of these things, so Google knows to check blog sites like WordPress often for new content.

Blogs are pre-optimized for search engines with search-friendly URLs, tags, categories, and keywords (which I will talk more about in a minute). Also sites like WordPress automatically create links to promote your blog. The only links on the homepage of wordpress.com are to WordPress blogs – they create links for you. Not only links from its homepage, but also submissions to blog indexes and directories because WordPress wants your blog to succeed/

Read more about blogging at http://en.wordpress.com/features/.

Develop a Blog Strategy

Now that you are sold on creating a blog, definitely develop a blog strategy before you begin blogging:

* How often will you create entries about your photographer business? I’d suggest 1-2 times per week with short posts (100-250 words) and lots of images.

* What keywords do you want your blog to rank for in search engines? This is your chance to rank for more terms, so try combinations of different cities or specialties.

* What will you blog about? Treat it as an online newsletter and discuss projects you’ve completed, events where your audience can see you, special offers, photography tips and tricks, or testimonials.

* How will your blog promote your main photography website?

I recommend WordPress as your blog platform because of the large availability of custom themes and designs available to photographers. You can easily use the free templates that are available or search the web for “wordpress photographer template” to find affordable custom designs for your blog. But there are many other blog sites available to develop free or cheap blogs.

SEO Tips and Tricks

Tip 1 – add a link to your main photographer website from every page of your blog. Remember how Google likes links? When you link to your main website from multiple places, it helps that site rank higher in search and it helps users learn more about your business. Use the links widget in WordPress to create a blogroll where you can add links to your website and partner websites. Another good spot to link is at the end of each blog post. You can say something like “More photos available at my San Diego Wedding Photography website.”

Tip 2 – use categories and keywords. Both categories and keywords are topic names that allow search engines and users to filter your blog posts. The categories and keywords you use on each post should be words or terms that you want to rank for in search engines. So if you want to rank for San Diego wedding photography, then that should be a category and a keyword in each one of your posts. Of course you can add additional ones that are more relevant to the individual topic of each post.

Tip 3 – strategize your tagline and excerpts. There is one tagline for your whole blog. It often shows up on your blog homepage, but may also act as the description of your blog that appears in search engines and blog directories. The excerpt is a brief overview of each blog post, like an abstract, that may show in search engines. Use major keywords in your excerpt, and try not to use something generic or simply repeat the title or text of your post.

Tip 4 – Edit the permalink to use major keywords. A permalink essentially becomes the URL for the post. If your blog post was named “My latest wedding in San Diego” then the permalink will typically be something like /my-latest-wedding.html. You can change this to use better keywords for example /san-diego-wedding-event.html because that will add a little bit more credibility when Google is looking for pages about San Diego weddings.

Check out the Photographer’s SEO Book for tips on how search engines work, photography-related keywords, blogging for photographers, and google analytics.

Tagged as: SEO Tips