Every photographer can benefit from getting found on the web by customers who are looking for their services or buy their prints. This means you should optimise your website to get found by search engines. This is search engine optimisation (SEO).

It’s not an exact science, but there are things you should do to get your site ranked highly in Google (and other search engines) and therefore help people to find you.

Every other photographer is also trying to do this, so you need to do it well, consistently and over a long period of time for it to happen. It is better to start right now and keep going indefinitely.

Keywords

Keywords is a term used to describe what your website is about and the words you want to be found for when people search. You should decide on one set of keywords for each page on your website. The keywords should be a short phrase e.g. Portrait Photographer London, or Fine Art Landscape Photography.

Some keywords have a very high number of searches every day, such as Photographer London, others have a lower search volume, e.g. Black and White Headshots London. Generally it is harder to get found for the high volume keywords as more photographers also want to get found for those terms.

I suggest a 3-4 word keyword combination for the main pages of your website, e.g.

Homepage keywords are Professional Photographer London

1st Portfolio Page – Portrait Photographer London

2nd Portfolio Page – Event Photographer London

This gives you the chance to target different keywords with each page.

You then use the keywords to ensure all of the content on that pages is relevant to those keywords

Page Title

This will appear at the top of the browser window (e.g. Portrait Photographer London). This tells visitors what they are looking at and gives Google something to read which tells it what to expect in the content.

You should make it short but descriptive and try to include a few words or phrases which might be used by your prospective customers. It must also contain your keywords – Joe Bloggs Photography is OK but Joe Bloggs – Commercial Portrait Photography in London is better.

If you are using one of the main photography website platforms it should be obvious where you enter these.

Description

The description should be a short sentence describing the content of the page.

It is like a longer version of the title so in the example above we could use Joe Bloggs is an award winning commercial portrait photographer working in London and the South East of England for advertising agencies and design companies. Don’t make it too long though – you shouldn’t add a whole client list!

The description will appear under the page title in a Google search result so it needs to entice people to click on the link, and it should contain your keywords to help you get found on the web.

Page Text (Content)

Search engines love text. They read it and analyse it and based on that they decide what is in your page. The more information there is in a site the more search engines can learn about your site and it should help to improve your search engine rankings

Each page should have a minimum of 300 words of content relevant to the keywords on it. We have over 1000 words of text on  main pages and know this helps rank them higher.

The content should be relevant to the keywords you want your page to get found for and it should also be readable by your audience.

You should structure your content into sub headings using something called h2 tags which you can add in your website platform. The h2 tags should be relevant to your keywords, e.g. a section on My Approach To Portrait Photography In London as a section on the page.

Images

Your main portfolio pages will contain a lot of images. There are a few things that will help to get you ranked higher in Google:

Don’t upload images with the file names that come out of the camera e.g. DSC_7253.jpg Instead you should change the filename with something relevant to your page e.g. Portrait_Photographer_London.jpg and name other images on that page with related terms e.g. Business_Headshot_Photography.jpg, Corporate_Portrait.jpg

When you upload your image to your website, you will see a box to add alt tags, caption and description. Make sure the alt tag is filled in with a relevant term and you can also do the same for the caption and description.

Don’t make the files bigger than they need to be. We suggest setting the resolution to 200ppi and 1000px on the long edge. This gives enough resolution to look good. If you upload full resolution images they take a long time to download and view on the web which slows your website down and Google sees this as a bad experience so doesn’t rate your website so highly.

Links

Google counts each link to your website from another website as a ‘vote’ for your site. Lots of links equals lots of votes equals a higher ranking. The quality of the site containing the link is also taken into account so a higher ranking site will result in the vote being effectively of a higher quality. Google also likes to see that your website is a good source of information that can be navigated well by users. So put links in your text to other pages in your website. Also, putting a link to another website in some of your pages is a good thing to do.

If you are a member of a camera club, association or society, make sure they link to your website. List your website on directories that people in your niche use. Ask for a link to your website whenever you can.

Blogging To Target Specific Keywords

Your main website pages should be set up to target the main search terms you want to get found for. But, often there are lots of other photographers trying to get found for those terms and they have been doing it for much longer than you. So it will take a long time for you to compete with them and get found.

A great tactic is to target very specific keywords that have less people searching for them so less other photographers targeting them. They are terms that people search for when looking for a photographer like you, but not the main terms.

Someone who owns a pug, looking for a dog photographer in Boston may search for:

Black and White Pug Photography Boston

Studio Dog Shoots

How To Get Good Photos Of A Pug

So, you should write blog posts about all of these topics. Try to follow all of the guidance in this section with regards to images, headings, links.

You should try to blog once a month as minimum, more often if you can. But don’t just write random stuff. Write content that a few people will search for. By then end of the year you will have 12 blog posts that each get found by 30 people per month. Thats 12×30= 360 people per month coming to your site, looking for specific and relevant terms related to what you do. And Google sees that you have over 10,000 words about your subject on your website so sees it as a valuable source of information and moves it up the rankings for your main search terms.

Updating Your Pages

Google also likes to see the content is fresh and regularly updated, so make sure you update the text slightly and change a few images on your main pages every few weeks.

Age Of Website

Websites that have been around for a while are more likely to rank highly in Google than brand new ones, so start this now, even if you are not fully ready to go with your business.

That’s all!

Seems like a lot, and it is. Everyone wants to get found on the web, and for good reason. If you get it right, you’ll generate a stream of enquiries.

Andrew Mason

Andrew is a professional photographer and the founder of the 36exp Photographers School plus the London Photo Show.