I had a chance to sit down with Michael Heu and philosophize about SEO and clickbooq. And by sit down I mean, me at my computer and he at his computer, conversing over email. First let me say I am always impressed to get quality feedback from an executive about search engine optimization. When the founder has a background in web and SEO then he is looking out for your interests as a photographer. That will reflect in the company’s product. Here is his official bio:
Michael Heu is one of the founders of clickbooq and has over 15 years of experience in design, user interface, SEO and interactive media. Prior to joining clickbooq full-time, he was the founder and partner of Intersect NYC creating websites and interactive applications for Sony, Isaac Mizrahi, Lucky Magazine, Liz Claiborne, CarZen, and Gucci among others.
Thus you will be pleased to read this Q&A about the thoughts and future of SEO at clickbooq.
What excites you about search engine optimization?
I think SEO is really incredible in the sense that it allows a level playing field when it comes to the digital landscape. Your stay-at-home blogger can command a presence and a following that was never possible before the rise of search engines. Although this has also made the landscape somewhat more spammy in terms of people trying to game the system, for the mopst part it’s simply incredible that I can find useful information based on the results that search engines provide. SEO is very useful as you can start to tailor your web marketing initiatives in a way that is cost effective and also generates targeted traffic for your business.
Will SEO features become the competitive edge for a website company like yourself?
clickbooq has always kept it’s eye on advances in SEO practices. Most Flash based websites have a difficult time generating good SEO rankings due to the inability for bots to crawl flash .swf files. However, clickbooq automatically generates a “ghost” html site that mirrors the content found on your “real” site, allowing the best of both worlds; great images for your potential customers and searchable content for the bots to crawl. We feel that our methodology has lead us to have an advantage over other companies in this regard. As our system evolves we are always looking for other ways to enhance our site’s SEO friendliness and improve our results for our clients.
What are you hearing from photographers about SEO?
The honest truth is that most don’t know anything about SEO – just a panic or a fear that they are not taking enough action. But some are much more in tune with what good SEO is and are happy to hear about the support our platform offers in this area. One of the biggest moves that a photographer can make is to use our platform in conjunction with a Wordpress blog and create posts and content that are keyword targeted. We’ve seen some great success with our clients that have had a dedicated approach to building their web site content with SEO in mind.
Zach recommends SEO for Photographer Sites: A Starting Point for the newbies in the house.
Do you have any advice for photographers just learning about SEO?
SEO is a tough nut to crack at the beginning if you don’t know anything about it. There’s a lot of terrible information out there and often people don’t really understand that SEO is part, a popularity contest. Optimizing your site is only 20% of the game while the other 80% is won by the back links that are pointing to your site (i.e. it’s popularity). The biggest thing that I learned when I was starting out was that I could have the greatest, prettiest website in the world, with ton’s of content. However, if no one ever linked to my site it was basically invisible for all intents and purposes.
Zach recommends Photographers Need Links to Rank in Search Engines.
So my advice is this: learn on-page techniques for SEO but don’t neglect off-page techniques such as getting links from other sites, blogs, directories, etc. Aother suggestion is to get focused when selecting your keywords. In other words don’t try to target “photographer” as your keyword unless you are willing to spend many years of your life getting hundreds or thousands of strong back links. Go “long-tail” for specific terms that have less competition overall. You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to examine search popularity for keywords to target and download the SEO For Firefox tool to examine the level of competition for a given keyword phrase.
Also, one link from a high PR website (that is “do-follow”) is way better than 100 links from low PR sites. Think of PR in terms of the Richter scale, the higher the PR the more important that link is, especially if it has your anchor text in the link.
What does the future hold for clickbooq?
We have a ton of new features in the works for this year and are continuing to evolve the platform so it adds even more value to our users.
Zach strongly recommends Clickbooq SEO Review: Websites for Professional Photographers
Get the clickbooq SEO How to Guide
clickbooq users can download the Photographers SEO Book here for $39 to get the clickbook SEO How to Guide ($10 value) included for free. That’s 5 bonus pages with screenshots of clickbooq specific advice for making the most of your clickbooq SEO features.
Photographers SEO Book offers easy to read and deploy steps for getting your site in Google. Photographers who read it immediately know what to rank for and why, plus how to SEO their sites with the right photography keywords and link building techniques.
- Over 25 pages of proven Google knowledge
- Perfect keyword text for your homepage
- Over 50 hand-picked link ideas
- Help making your images visible to search
- Google Analytics, blogging, SEO tools…
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I’m not much of a commenter on things I read on the web but I felt that the presentation of the information on this subject was so well done that it deserves to be recommended to all with an interest in the topic. Professional writing and thorough subject knowledge make this a great read.
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