June 29th, 2010 // One Comment
Google looks at keywords on your blog and the links pointing to your blog when considering it for a good rank in search engines. When someone searches for a wedding photographer, let’s say in San Diego, Google wants to find pages that are about “San Diego wedding photographer.” If you have a page that’s about wedding and portrait photography, or Los Angeles wedding photographer, you have less of a chance of ranking well because that is not what the user searched for. Specific pages are good. Assuming you have a page that’s only about “San Diego wedding photographer,” Google will consider you for rank against the hundreds of other pages on the same topic. The way to the top is by getting links to your blog. The site with the most quality links typically rank #1.
So what can you do to your blog to rank well? The first is getting that key phrase, in this case “San Diego wedding photographer,” in the right places on the page. I’m talking about page titles, URLs, the first paragraph of text, and text behind your images. Those are the main ones. Sometimes this is not an easy task. First you have to focus on one single phrase per page. Where most photographers go wrong is optimizing for too many things. So my best advice is this. Before you write each post, consider what you want to rank that post for. That is the phrase to use in the right locations. The trick is figuring out how to control the keywords in places like your title and URL. Some simple setup of your blog infrastructure can quickly and easily get the right system in place. For example if you have blog posts where the URLs are generic post numbers, or the date you posted it – your blog is not taking advantage of getting keywords in the URLs. If your blog posts add the blog name at the end of each title – you’re including a lot of extra keywords in your titles that dilute your ability to rank. My ebook called Blog SEO Zen for photographers talks about how to set up all of these things.
When you’re thinking about what to rank for, smaller terms are better. It will be easier to rank for Ritz Hotel wedding photos in San Diego since there are very few pages on that exact topic. Focus on locations, venues, or wedding-style with your keywords.
The next step is simply to get links to your blog so that your blog appears more popular than other sites that talk about the same thing you do. There’s tons of ways to get links. For example, I’m creating this post for a site that is not my own, and for doing this favor I get a link back to my site. Guest posts and articles are just about the best links you can get when your out there manually building links to your site. Other link generation ideas include getting yourself out there in photography communities, establishing social bookmarking accounts like Digg or Delicious, and submitting to key blog directories like Technorati. I suggest plenty more link locations in Blog SEO Zen.
Lastly I want to mention that a self-hosted blog with WordPress.org has the most SEO features. WordPress offers the ability to control your titles, URLs, plus search-specific plugins like the All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. I also use a paid program called Scribe (I’m an affiliate) which analyzes each post I write for SEO efficiency. WordPress should easily be able to outrank any blog on Typepad or Blogger.
I hope that helps you get started with blog optimization. The quickest way to get everything you need to know is in my ebook for photoblog SEO.
Tags: all in one seo pack, Google XML sitemaps, link building, plugins, scribe, wedding photographers, wordpress
kenya
1 year ago
great post. i just discovered your blog on photography blogging via Paperie Boutique. already have the photographers seo book. a good read!