My good friend & killer photographer Alan Nielsen from Nine Live Photography asked me today:
“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:
Recently (August 2nd) i had my wedding, and my wife & I headed to Hawaii for an epic 2 week honeymoon. We spent the tail end of our honeymoon on the island of Oahu, where Honolulu is. One afternoon we were driving back to Honolulu and we decided we would go check out Pearl Harbor. 
