“I just checked out my website grade on grader.com and I’m down to a 51/100! What can I do? I’m nowhere to be found on Google. I’m beyond page 10, which means nobody is finding me.”

Maintaining a photography blog is tricky because you have to balance showing off your work with driving traffic to your site. Here are some tips i gave him to help him do both:

1) Your post titles & URL’s are date heavy.  Stop putting the date manually in your post titles because it is redundant, you want the url to be mostly useful relevant content – numbers are wasteful.  In this example, you want to get people searching for “cookie thief” vs “july 27th 2010″.  Notice the difference below:

Permalink: http://www.ninelivephotography.ca/2010/07/27/july-27th-2010-my-365-cookie-thief/ 
Post title: July 27th 2010 – my 365 – Cookie Thief

vs

Permalink: http://www.ninelivephotography.ca/2010/07/27/my-365-cookie-thief/ 
Post title: The Cookie Thief (i added the word ‘the’ in)

2) Amount of content.  Your posts tend to be very short, like a few sentences long.  There is nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t lend itself well to SEO because when the search engine looks at the page, they don’t see much content relevant to that keyword so it gets less weighting.  I’d also suggest linking out from your site more to other blogs, messageboards etc etc…

3) WordPress tweaks.  Some of this you’ve probably already done.  Do you have google webmaster tools setup?  Do you have the SEO all in one plugin installed?  Google sitemaps plugin?  These help make sure you are indexed faster.

4) Type of content.  Seems almost all of your posts are promoting your pictures.  Seeing your work once someone gets to the site is important in establishing trust/compentency and having them contact you for a quote etc – but it doesn’t do much to get them there.  There is a good marketing quote that goes something like “Nobody cares about your products / services.  What they care about is solving their problems.”  If i were you I would focus on photography tips, tricks, how to’s & tutorials because that is what people are searching for.  Doing that will drive much more traffic (potentially virally if it’s a good post), and establish you as a thought leader etc etc…all that will eventually lead to more photography work for you.

The other thing about those type of posts, is you can share them on facebook pages / message boards / digg etc and it drives traffic to your site without seeming like you are spamming your services.  ”hey just thought you guys would find this interesting since it’s relevant to the discussion going on here:….” – something like that.

Matt Cutts from Google also has some good tips for photographers looking to optimize their sites for search engines:

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To be fair, this issue may be specific to Canadian shipping addresses.

Around mid-May i ordered a Dodocase for my iPad. I knew it would be a long lead time for it to ship, but what they didn’t tell me was the ship time going outside the US is ridiculous. Approaching a month since it shipped and it still hasn’t arrived!

It takes just over a month to walk from San Francisco to my home in Milton ontario. So – something is very wrong with either:

a) Dodocase’s shipping process
b) The US postal service OR
c) Canadian customs

Why isn’t Dodocase offering other shipping methods (i.e Fedex / UPS etc…). I’m sure people will gladly pay extra to have a tracking number that works.

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No better way to start the work week than track 27 at union station

1. Kick it off with a 15 minute delay sitting on the tracks at Spadina.
2. Don’t apologize for the delay when we start moving again.
3. Take a few thousand commuters and drop them off at track 27. For those not familiar with track 27, it is the least desirable drop off point at Union Station in Toronto. It’s a very thin track waiting area so the exits are teeny tiny and it adds like 5-10 minutes to your commute just to get down the stairs & out of the fucking station, and for those travelling north (most commuters), it’s at the very far south end of Union.

At least increase the size / number of exits!

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Yeah, we were pretty far back.

Last night i packed up my air drums and headed into the city for Toronto’s very own Rush. Here’s the salient points:

- Neil Peart: he still has it, although damn he is looking old these days.
- Geddy Lee: the vox, the slappa da bas, the keyboards – BRILLIANT
- I now have an appreciation for the last 3 tracks on Moving Pictures (Camera Eye / Witch Hunt / Vital Signs)
- The older material was absolutely incredible, some of the newer stuff is good but it has a generic hard rock feel and is not as interesting as the more adventurous 70′s/80′s songs.
- The comedic videos throughout the show were fun, in particular the “i love you man” reprise at the end.
- Molson Amphitheater while fine once you get into the venue, is an absolute disaster to get in and out of in typical Toronto fashion.
- There is a sweet free parking area on the north side of the Gardiner Expressway just west of British Columbia on a side street.

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This is a funny photo gallery of 100 firework vendors all fighting each other for your mindshare, but i think it’s also a good metaphor for the state of most advertising these days. As Seth Godin says, when we are overwhelmed by choice we stop listening.

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Update: After playing around with all my apps a bit more, i can now say the issue with the buggy apps is much much worse than i originally thought. I would now strongly advise against installing this update. If you have updated to 4.0 and want to downgrade, here’s how.

After yesterday’s announcement i logged into my Apple developer account and installed the iphone 4.0 beta firmware. It’s been almost 24 hours, and i can say it’s definitely a mixed bag so far. While there are some awesome features like unified inbox & folders, there are some things you should know if you want to be an early adopter:

Cautions
- Photos app is buggy. I.E opening “Places” crashes the app for me consistently.
- Visual Voicemail doesn’t work anymore (i’m with Rogers in Canada, your mileage may vary)
- I’m seeing new bugs (probably due to the presence of the new APIs) in my existing/previously perfect apps. I.E Tweetie 2 crashes whenever i try to do a Twitter search. It’s pretty rare though. Most if not all apps work perfectly fine after installing.
- If you are going to setup Folders know that if you change anything regarding the apps selected to sync to your iphone within iTunes it will remove all your folders since iTunes knows nothing about Folders.
- Apps seem to stay open until you close them using the new multitasking footer. Double tapping the home button exposes the open apps and tapping/holding allows you to close an app. Discovered this when i started to run into memory issues.
- 4.0 updates the baseband, so you can’t revert back to 3.x (this is 4 life people)

I’ve probably missed a few, but these were the major ones. If you can live with all of this, i’d say go for it and install. If not, wait till the summer.

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My post on Tap Defense strategies generated 40k+ uniques in a year and continues to drive traffic

(I’m going to do a few of these over the next little while, with each one focused on a different part of the online marketing mix)

1. Create Something
Write a blog post. Start a podcast. Develop an eBook. Make something original people can’t get anywhere else. Make sure it’s search engine friendly.

2. Plant the seed
*Carefully* share the link to your content on relevant sites (digg, facebook groups/fan page, other blog comments – do some research to determine what’s appropriate). Do not spam, and never use it as a selling opportunity.

3. Don’t be a quitter
This is a key step. At first almost everything you post will seem to fall flat. Don’t be like every corporate marketing department and give up after 1 week of trying it out.

Rinse & repeat steps 1-3.

If you build it, they will come…eventually
It may take 6 months to a year of regular content marketing before you see results. The bottom line is if you create lots of content, you may not see much traffic from any particular piece of content but collectively the effect is like rain in a bucket (it all adds up), and with some persistence you will see that bucket overflow. The best part? This can all be done for free using free open source tools like WordPress.

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