Please note the advice here is aimed at the average photographer who has images of particular themes and geographic locations and wishes to appropriately inform a search engine what their site is about, but the suggestions can be related to most sites photographic or not.
Lets do this with an example of a theoretical photographers website. Fred Smith who is a wedding photographer in London (my apologies if there is a real Fred Smith wedding photographer). As mentioned in the previous posts it pays to think like those who are searching so start by asking yourself what terms people are most likely to use when looking for a shooter for their wedding. Well the most obvious is “wedding photographer”, but most people are location specific so maybe “London wedding photographer” or “wedding photographer London” maybe a starting point or even a more specific suburb name. But rather than trying to second guess you can use wordtracker or overture or something else and come up with a series of keywords which people actually used to search with – see below – but always use some intuition especially if your sites niche is narrow and may not be often searched for (eg nature photographers selling stock images of particular species or places).
wedding photography, digital wedding photography, photography wedding, professional wedding photography, black and white wedding photography, photojournalistic wedding photography, pictures, photos, bridal, portrait, bride, groom
Ok now Fred has a starting point around which to build a theme for his site. The next piece of advice is not to try and jam every set of keywords into one page maybe just a couple of phrases, the most important and competitive ones, for the front page.
“London Wedding Photography”, “London Wedding Photographer” “suburb wedding photographer” but don’t NOT use some or all of the other keywords they help set the tone for the rest of the site.
Title Tag: make sure these terms end up in the pages title somehow.
For example “London Wedding Photographer – Photography Fred Smith” or “London Wedding Photography – Photographer Fred Smith” notice that Fred’s name is last because it is not a particularly competitive term more weight is placed on terms at the being rather than the end of a title tag.
Write a set of keywords and a description (these thing probably don’t add much weight to a page but probably help reinforce the theme – again don’t stuff unrelated keywords or over do the density – once is probably enough.
Ok You should try to add some text to the page – advertising copy is the way the think about it – it should be natural and informative eg “Fred Smith is a London Photographer who takes documentary style black and white wedding pictures…….” The more the better natural and containing your keywords.
Add a H1 header tag at the top with one of your keyword phrases in it eg London Wedding Photography – then at another point further down a a H2 tag with another eg Fred Smith Photographer. This reinforces what Freds site is about –
Add bold underline or italics to some of the key words in the copy eg black and white wedding pictures – DO NOT do this to all words or use bold underline and italics on the same keywords – this is probably considered spam
Add alt tags to some of your images eg “example wedding image” “black and white wedding shot” using one or two additional neutral terms in the alt tag like image shot graphic make it less spammy and again don’t over do it alt tags are mean to inform and shouldn’t be used to stuff extraneous keywords.
Text links to other pages with keywords embedded are great for telling the search engines what your site is about – so a link which says “Black and White Portfolio” and points to a page optimised to show off your black and white images. A series of these pages based on how you want to theme your site and links to them with appropriate text links eg “Bridal Gallery” “Groom Portfolio” “Colour Portfolio” etc etc
Well that should be enough to tell a search engine what the index page of Fred’s site is about – the next thing to do as I mentioned in the last paragraph is to treat every page as an opportunity to get traffic so build more pages in theme areas you want to target this will maximise the targeted traffic you get to your site – not everyone searches using the same way and people might look for “black and white bridal photographer London” for example so you will want pages which will tell the search engines that your site’s content is relevant to this set of keywords.
