Why SEO is Important to Photographers and How You Can Get Started

September 13, 2012

Two months ago, a reader commented on my site regarding my pricing e-book and needing more traffic.

To answer Brady’s dilemma, there are a few ways to generate traffic.

Social – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
Word of Mouth – friends, photographers, vendors
Search Engine – Google, Bing, Yahoo

To not do one is to reduce 33% of your potential. With the prevalence of social media, a lot of people wonder whether search engine optimization (SEO) is dead.

My website has considerable traffic. And I put a lot of effort into social media, but search still dominates my inbound traffic.

While social media is an effective tool to perpetuate engagement with existing clients, search allows you to organically find new prospects who may have never heard of you.

What is SEO?

For starters, SEO is an acronym. It stands for search engine optimization. If you’ve been browsing the Internet, chances are you’ve stumbled upon Google, Yahoo, Bing or some equivalent website that generates search results for queried keywords.

SEO is a popular form of inbound marketing where prospects come to you inwardly based on a searched term. The goal of SEO is for prospects to find out about your business through relevant keywords aside from your company name. Therefore, searching yourself does not count.

PageRank (PR)

There are many components to having good SEO. It’s more than just good keywords.

Have you ever wondered why some websites are higher in search results while others are lower? And even if all of the websites have good SEO applications, they’ll never be equal.

One of the biggest influences is Google PageRank or PR for short. PR is a measurement for a website’s influence or priority. The higher the PR, the more powerful it is. The lower the PR, the less powerful it is … or the less “Google Juice” it has.

The scale ranges from zero being the lowest to 10 being the highest. An example of a 0/10 website might be one I just created a week ago. An example of a 10/10 website might be Google, which is very powerful – namely because of the many backlinks.

The higher the PR, the higher you’ll rank in search engines! Of course, there’s a lot more to it, but that’s one of the most important steps.

Backlinks are links from other websites directing to your website. To determine the PR of a website, I use a plugin for the Firefox browser called “SEO Toolbar.”
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seo-toolbar-13927/

Once installed, it should appear above your Firefox toolbar.

In a nutshell, your website’s PR increases based on the number and strength of backlinks. The more links (hopefully strong ones), the better. You could check out your own PR at any time as well as your competitors’. Cool, right?

Two Types of Links

Links are really important because they are perceived as votes or vouches for another website. For example, would you link to a sketchy website? Probably not. In fact, if you did, you might even be penalized and banned from search results.

There are two types of links.

rel=”follow” links
Topically relevant links

For example, did you know that rel=”nofollow” links don’t do anything for you? So, you could get a million “nofollow” links (e.g., from Facebook or Twitter) and it won’t help your PR?

I won’t get into detail here because the post would be super long, but you can download the Introduction to Links for FREE, by signing up below. It will include:

What SEO Is
How SEO Works
PageRank (PR)
Backlinks
Relevant Links – topical and nofollow tags
How to Get Links

Kind Words

In 2009, I hosted a nationwide workshop tour for SEO strategies. Since then, search engines have made many updates of which I included in an e-book; coupled with more advanced strategies. Here is a testimonial from my 2009 workshop.