The idea here is to explain a couple of the basic, though often overlooked, components of SEO, specifically keyword research and creating title tags, while also giving you specific tips on how to get started optimizing your own site.
Keyword Research -
Any good SEO strategy begins with keyword research. Keyword research allows you to find keywords and combinations that people are searching on.
Although there are a plethora of keyword research tools out there, Google has made it easy for us by offering a great free tool you can access here: http://bit.ly/9u0oNP.
We will be referencing this tool in the rest of this post so please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it.
To begin, insert a few words that relate to what you do. In this case, “Wedding Photographer”, “Wedding Photography”, etc, then press ‘Search’.
The first thing you should notice is that there are approximately 1,220,000 Global Monthly Searches. Since we’ve chosen ‘United States’, and ‘English’ as our parameters in our search, these numbers should reflect this.
“Wow”, you say, “If I could only get 1/10th of those people visiting my site and I will be set.” Well, yes, that would be great, but not very realistic. What I like to do, and what I suggest to others is something more ‘localized’, which is to say, add your ‘locale’ to the terms you are trying to rank for.
For example, you might try to rank for “Orange County Wedding Photographer”, “San Diego Wedding Photographer”, or try reversing the order of the words using “Wedding Photographer Orange County”.
Broad Phrases (Hard to rank for): Photographer, Wedding Photographer, Portrait Photographer
Local Phrases (May be difficult to rank for): San Francisco Wedding Photographers, Palo Alto Portrait Photographer
Long-Tail (Easy): San Francisco Wedding Photographer Price List
Not only is this much more realistic to rank for those terms, though still possibly difficult, it also targets the area in which you work.
Armed with this data, we can now move on to the site optimization process.
Called different things by different web site template companies and content management software products, the title tag we are referring to is typically also called the ‘page title’.
The blue text in the image below is how your sites’ title tag is displayed in Google.
The image shows how your browser (in this case Safari) shows the title tag.
Finally, the image below is how the title tag is displayed in your code, within the <head> tag.
You will need to change your title tags, in all likelihood, to reflect the keywords we’ve just discovered. It is recommended that you optimize a page for fewer than 5 specific keywords or keyword phrase variations. That means you’ll want to make the most of this by using different title tags on each different page of your website and/or blog.
Here are examples of how, and how not to write title tags.
Incorrect:
“Shannon Priestly Modern, Lifestyle Photography, San Francisco Wedding Photographer, Portrait Photography, Boudoir Photography, Baby Photographer, Maternity Photos, etc, etc, etc…”
Correct:
“LDV Photography : San Francisco Wedding Photographers” (52 chars)
or
“San Francisco Wedding Photographer | LDV Studio”
There is debate on the topic of putting your studio/business name at the beginning of your title tag, the end, or leave it out entirely.
The reasoning goes something like this…. Because more weight is given by Google to the words in the beginning of the title tag, you should make sure your keyword is the first thing you use in constructing your title tag. While I’ve witnessed this being the case, I also have many examples where a site with it’s brand name is before the keyword and still ‘out ranks’ the site with keywords at the beginning.
In my opinion, it helps your listing to standout as well as to give you one more ‘touch’ in the brand recognition battle.
This is something that I suggest you test on your own. You could start out by adding the keyword in the first position, then later once you are ranking on the first page for that term, you could try changing the word order.
In conclusion, it is important to begin with the end in mind and give more than a moment’s thought to the keywords you are targeting, and make sure that you are constructing title tags which are inline with your keyword phrase ranking goals.
Written by Wade Holloway
Wade Holloway is an (online marketer) SEO for Photographers. You can find out more at FolioMojo.com.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Wade,
This was a great intro to SEO and I am glad to see that starting with keyword research is the first thing you mention. Too often SEO intros start with how to add keywords and other on-page SEO elements to your page. Without a clear goal as to what keywords to target, it could be wasting some time.
For anyone using WordPress, there are some built in features and a set of plugins that can help improve the on-page SEO, including the addition of the title tag to every page.
All in One SEO Pack:
This plugin lets you control the title tag (and description) of every page. If you don’t add anything, it will use the post title and an excerpt from the post. This is the most downloaded WordPress plugin for a reason.
SEO Friendly Images:
This plugin will add ‘ALT’ attributes to every image you upload through the visual editor as you create or edit a post. It will add the post’s title and possibly the site (there are a few options) to every image as the ‘ALT’ and ‘TITLE’ attributes.
SEO Image Galleries:
Using WordPress for the text but still using Flash galleries is missing a great chance to add those all important ‘ALT’ attributes to all those images. This was the impetus behind SEO Image Galleries – it is all HTML and CSS based, adding ‘ALT’ and ‘TITLE’ attributes to every image in your gallery, based on post title, gallery name, etc. (again, lots of options).
DISCLAIMER: this is my own plugin, developed for http://PhotographyBlogSites.com but made available for free via WordPress.org
All three plugins can be installed automatically through WordPress or downloaded from WordPress.org site by searching the plugins section.
WordPress does a lot by itself and with some added plugins, it is an SEO machine that needs very little maintenance from the user.
Again – great article Wade. Looking forward to any follow ups you write.
-Marty
Hi Marty,
Thanks for your comment.
Although out of the scope of this article, I’m a huge WordPress fan, and yes, they have an amazing community of developers that contribute a great deal in the form of plugins and themes.
Two of the plugins you mentioned, AIOSP and SFI, are two of my favorites. I haven’t tried your plugin but I will take a look now that I know about it.
I think, though, that having a foundation or understanding the reasoning behind a particular plugin and how to configure it properly is of significant importance.
Although many plugins come out of the box pre-configured, to get the most benefit you’ll need to understand, for example, ‘why’ one would choose, or not, to make category pages indexable and the like.
Nice article Wade. Think that having a strategy is important! Most people just getting into the game will not be able to compete on larger search terms, so you are you right on the money having them check out the keyword search. Another route would be to go after venues that they want to be shooting at…most people are not doing this yet!
I realize this is a “How to Start”…maybe next could be how to measure, which is key in any endeavor.
Wade – good points.
In any of these plugins I mentioned, there are options, most of which come back to page and post titles, how to get keywords in there, etc. And all of that should start with your base of keyword research.
Hey J!
I enjoyed your post! I can’t get your RSS feed to work, can you check it?
I searched everywhere to findsomething related to this area….. Thank you very much