PhotoMerchant SEO Review for Photography Sites

Create search optimized and beautiful photography portfolios with PhotoMerchant, plus all that other stuff you need to build your online business. And since I’m an inner beauty kind of guy, this post will outline for you the gorgeous SEO features of the PhotoMerchant system. They are hot. With easy access to all the main search engine optimization elements, all you need is a little help from the Photographers SEO Book for the best text and links to use on your photography website homepage and galleries. After all, without the right text and links in place, the best system in the world won’t help your rank. Just launched in Australia, PhotoMerchant is coming soon to the US.

One of the most important parts of SEO for photographers is getting stuff that Google can interpret onto your homepage. That means non-Flash, HTML-based text and images that you can control. PhotoMerchant has you covered…

Choose Your PhotoMerchant HTML Homepage

You choose any page you want to be your homepage! Very cool. It can be an HTML based page (great option) with lots of text and images, or a portfolio page (also a decent option if you name and describe your galleries well). In the portfolio page option you can show a list of your galleries  or a list of your gallery categories and either includes a thumbnail photo and description. Users can easily access your images and search sees lots of helpful code about your website not found in Flash sites. For example, the screenshot below shows a homepage with just one gallery featured, but you can see the gallery image and gallery description. The alt tag for the image uses the name of the gallery – helpful for search.

Example Homepage With One Gallery and Description

Titles and Meta Descriptions

As important as homepage text is your site and page titles. PhotoMerchant gives you access to edit the title, meta description, and keywords for your homepage, about page, and services page.

Gallery pages dynamically use titles and descriptions from other fields. For example the title of your galley page is forced to be Gallery Name: Site Name and the meta description is the description for your gallery (which may be hundreds of characters long). If you set your portfolio to be your homepage, then no meta description will appear for your homepage.

One note: meta descriptions do not help your rank position, they only entice users to click on your search result. So it’s better to use a compelling marketing statement here than keyword loading. Second, meta keywords are ignored! You won’t find any on my websites. If you must use them (and expose yourself to competitors) then use 5 or less words please.

Keywords and Categories

PhotoMerchant offers a field for image keywords. These keywords display on the page to help search engines (and users) understand what the image is about, but there is a much greater SEO benefit. Each keyword is hyperlinked to a page that aggregates all the images with that keyword for example /galleries/sydney-weddings/tag/bride. So you have potentially tens or hundreds of new keyword pages that add substance to your site and can potentially rank in Google.

Users View PhotoMerchant's Hyperlinked Image Keywords

Similarly, create categories for your galleries that can aggregate galleries of similar keyword types. The category name acts as the URL for your category, like /categories/weddings in the example below.

Gallery Categories in PhotoMerchant

URLs and Filenames

Subpages and galleries are all placed at the root level and the folder names determined based on the name of the page or the gallery. For example a gallery called Sydney Weddings would have a URL of /Sydney-Weddings, so your naming structure becomes very important.

Images lose their filenames during upload and will be converted to something meaningless to SEO. For example:
/memberdata/image_cache/300square_1781262710324849_1483414456.jpg

Obviously it would be better if you could use a folder and file path like /galleries/weddings/san-diego-bride-saying-vows.jpg because that gives Google some great information about your content and can help your rank. But that is not an option in the current version.

SEO Headers and Footers

Quickly rename the links in your top navigation. Not only are these links text-based (good for SEO) but the link name duplicates as the URL for the page (great for SEO).

Name Your Pages and Set Your Homepage

Your “Weddings” page will be /weddings and not /node123 or something meanigless like I have seen on some photography sites.

Top navigation buttons can link to new pages that you create. New Page button not shown in the above screenshot. This may be helpful if you want to build a special landing page for a search engine marketing pay per click campaign. If you don’t believe my advice above about sitemaps, then perhaps you can manually create a sitemap page. Or you can link away to your blog site, but still keep a link to it in your main navigation.

Your photography logo that appears at the top of the site can also help search. The filename of the logo will appear as the alt text for the logo (and is how Google reads it) or if you don’t have a logo the name of your site displays as text at the top of the page.

The footer is customizable including room for HTML tags, so you can add keywords and links. But no removing the “Powered by PhotoMerchant” link that will appear there.

You Can Embed HTML in Your PhotoMerchant Footer

Google Analytics

Easily integrate your web stats (Google Analytics) with PhotoMerchant by entering your Analytics ID into your administation page. With this free web tracking software you can see who is checking out your website including specifically what keywords are sending you traffic from Google! Google Analytics is the only tool I use and recommend for web stats.

Add a Google Anlytics ID to Track Web Stats

Integrated Sitemap Not Offered

Sitemaps do add a level of SEO-friendliness to a websites by allowing search engines to quickly index the contents of your site without looking at all the pages, like reading a table of contents. Although it does not come standard in this case, they are not entirely essential for PhotoMerchant sites at this point. I think the main benefit of site maps are so that Google can find and index all of your site’s content quickly and easily, which is already being done for PhotoMerchant sites based on its clean navigation system and keyword tagging of images (if you are using that feature). Basically the links that PhotoMerchant automatically creates allows Google to find your content without sitemaps.

How Much is a Higher Rank Worth to You?

Did you know that 25% of users click the first result and only 12% click the second result? The Photographers SEO Book can help you increase your rank with tips on text and linking specific to photographers. You’ve invested in your website, now invest in its results with easy to understand and implement tips for search engines.

Zach recommends PhotoMerchant US Launch will Compete with BluDomain, Clickbooq

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