Your a photographer, you know about the shutter speed, DOF, and you may even know the difference between an EF and EF-S lens. But when it comes to your website, is it all a foreign language, and a myriad of different terms that mean absolutely nothing to you? Well read on, and we’ll explain the basic SEO principles for your website.
Firstly, what is SEO and what does it mean and do?
SEO stands for Search engine optimisation. It is about maximising your site, so the search engines (Google, Bing etc) know where your site should be for various search terms in the listings. SEO for photographers is pretty much the same as any other sites SEO. If you wanted to be on the first page for the search term ‘Wedding Photographer London’ you would maximise your site for that term.
So, how do we do it, and what do we need to know?
Lets stick with our ‘Wedding Photographer London’ keyword, that we want to do well in the search engines for. Ideally, for any page we want 3 keywords, so we’ll add ‘London Wedding Photographer’ and ‘Wedding Photography London’ in as well. This gives us our 3 keywords to start working with. From here, we can build our page, and put these keywords into the various areas.
Depending on what browser your using, at the top of the page, maybe in the tab, it says what the page is about. For this page it says ‘Basic SEO For Photographers’. This is called the page title, and should include your main keyword.
Next, in the address bar is the URL. This should also include another of your keywords. The URL is the bit that looks like this: https://badgespatches.com/photography-website-seo-the-basics
Then we have the Meta Description. This is a hidden piece of code that explains what the page is about. Depending on what browser your using, you may be able to right click on a page, and have an option to ‘View Source’. This will bring up a page with alot of code, that will include an area that says ‘<meta description’ . This is read by the search engines and is sometimes used in search results as the description of your site. This should also contain a keyword.
And finally for this section, we have the page content. This is the writing that is on your page. Ideally you want this to be about 500 to 750 words, and have a keyword density of between 0.5 and 5%. Don’t over do your keywords, as the major search engines don’t like this.
That is a very basic view of what you need to do to your own site. We will write more posts going into greater depth about this all. If you have brought one of our websites for photographers, you can enter all the above points into your posts and pages by activating one of the SEO plugins.
Some people suggest that SEO on your webpage is only about 20% of what you should be doing, and the other 80% is off site. Have a look at our SEO packages for some ideas of to build backlinks into your site, and you can also order a page review there, to see if your webpage is optimised enough for the search engines.,