5 replies
  • SEO
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I am very much a newbie whose trying to be on a fast track to understanding SEO as quickly as possible and I've learned a great deal through many of the posts here on this forum. This said, I do have a couple of questions that I'm hoping that someone will answer.

First a little background:

Almost three months ago I created my second ever website using Squarespace. The focus of my website will be for my photography with the hopes of selling an occasional print. The website consists of 6 galleries of 20 photographs each. Each photograph has a few sentences to a a few paragraphs describing the photograph.

Once the website was up and running, I created a Facebook account and a Blog on my website that mirrors the Facebook account. Actually, I write the content on the blog and send the link to the Facebook account. After 2 months I've got 54 likes (roughly half of my friend lists) I try to stay consistent with one entry a day.

Recently I created accounts on Yelp, Foursquare, Tumbler, Pininterest, Flickr, Linkedin, DPReview, Metromix, TripAdvisor, and Disqus4. Each account has my full profile and website listed. I did this to try and establish some back-links for both follow and no follow. Some of these accounts I already have a lot of content on and others need some attention from me by adding further content.

I've also done the obligatory things as well.

1. Ran my website through nibbler.silktide.com/
2. Ran my website through woorank.com
3. Ran my website through google.com/webmasters/tools
4. Set up Google Analytics

Other than W3C Validity (13) errors and the suggestion of adding a Google + account (woorank.com) my website seems to be okay. Per Google WebMaster Tools, their are no errors.


So here are my questions.

1. Keywords. If I have a photograph and an associated text block describing the photograph, do I need to worry about "keywords"? I played around with keywordeye.com/free/ and I am having difficulty seeing how I would incorporate those results into my text block on the page?

2. Tags. Do I need to worry about these? SquareSpace allows me to tag each photograph with keywords, but I've already used these words in the accompanying text block that goes with each photograph.

3. What else should I be doing that I have overlooked?

4. What is a realistic goal for me to see my website listed? Right now, my site does't list on a Google search. When I type in site: and my website Google does list my site and accompanying pages.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading my inquiry. Any advice would be appreciated.
#advice #steps
  • Profile picture of the author jezter6
    I think your first step is evaluating if SEO is really what YOU need for YOUR site.

    Search engine traffic can be tough to convert if they're not into "buying" keywords, which can be extra hard to fit into very short descriptions of individual photos for sale.

    And realistically, what keywords (this is rhetorical, don't post your keywords here) are people really looking for that your site would be found in a search?

    At least you have more than just a few products available, but what do you really have to offer someone searching to buy a print as compared to much larger multi-artist sites that carry an EXTREMELY wide array of photos that can be turned into prints?

    Unless your photos are very niche in nature so that someone is looking for "train tunnel prints" - you have the definitive collection of prints in that niche where a bigger site a user might struggle to get through thousands of "train" prints to find ones that have them in tunnels.. (no, I didn't research that niche to know if it's even real)

    But if you're just selling very generic "here's a picture of a wide open meadow" or something -- there's really not much you're going to go after for a site. Maybe ensuring that keywords like that are in proper tags for On-Site SEO and hope that a few random long-tails get you ranked. Maybe you can find a keyword that's easy to slide into for a few photos...

    Otherwise, I think you'd be building backlinks and wasting time blogging for keywords to get people to a site that probably doesn't offer anything other than the unique quality that is YOU, the photographer.

    At that point, your objective should be more like branding and social media advertising (or at least promoting in photog groups and such).

    Ensuring that "Photo Prints by inchhh" gets you top results for people who search for you by name shouldn't be too hard...but trying to rank a single photographer site for bigger keywords is probably a waste of time.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
    Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post


    4. What is a realistic goal for me to see my website listed? Right now, my site does't list on a Google search. When I type in site: and my website Google does list my site and accompanying pages.

    If you've made it this far, thanks for reading my inquiry. Any advice would be appreciated.
    Do you have a sitemap?


    I would give this a read.. https://support.google.com/webmaster...r/178636?hl=en
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  • Profile picture of the author itchhh2
    Thanks for your feedback. My first website several years ago was one of those sites as you suggested that was full of "train tunnel prints". It was a typical landscape site that had a little bit of everything from mountains & glaciers to bald eagles and bears. I was fortunate enough to be published twice with two magazine covers, but in the end it payed very little. I also used my name as the web address which was meaningless when compared with the likes of Art Wolfe, Thomas Mangelsen, and Peter Lik to name just a few.

    With my new website, I decided to learn from my past mistakes and laser focus on just one subject and a subject that wasn't as competitive as "landscapes". Living in a city that is a top 10 travel destination, I thought I would focus on the city and things that make that city unique. Part of my research was to look up competitive sites from New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, St Louis, and Washington DC. I looked at the best website from each city and tried to fashion the best parts together with my own flair. Each of these sites for each of these cities is on page one or page two of their respective Google Searches. This is what I want to do. By the way, if I may say so, my photographs are at least on par with their respective work.

    I think your first sentence is straight and to the point; is SEO right for me and my Website? I don't know. What I do know is that for each page that has a photograph, also has a text block with a full description of the photograph. Is this enough in and of itself for SEO or do I need to be doing somehting else?

    It's interesting that you mentioned "doesn't offer anything other than the unique quality that is YOU, the photographer." As I mentioned earlier, my previous website was my name and with this new site, I put the name of the city and "photographs" into web address name. LOL! I stripped out all personal identifiers and made it all about the city itself. Perhaps that was a mistake?

    I don't think SEO by itself is going to get me where I need to be. I think some type of advertising program is going to be important. Ultimately, I want my target audience to be corporate accounts, but in order to do that, I need get listed on A Google search. Thus where to go from here?

    How long does it take from my site to show up in a Google search . . . even if its page ten?

    What else should I be doing?

    Blaine excellent question, I did submit my site map to Google.
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    • Profile picture of the author jezter6
      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post

      Thanks for your feedback. My first website several years ago was one of those sites as you suggested that was full of "train tunnel prints". It was a typical landscape site that had a little bit of everything from mountains & glaciers to bald eagles and bears. I was fortunate enough to be published twice with two magazine covers, but in the end it payed very little. I also used my name as the web address which was meaningless when compared with the likes of Art Wolfe, Thomas Mangelsen, and Peter Lik to name just a few.
      You said below your site is basically "City Name Photos" - how is that much different than just "train tunnel photos"? What you're doing is creating a decent niche for people looking for photos of a very specific city.

      I think that will help you out because you have some focus. For the sake of conversation, I'm just going to use "NYC" for your city because I don't know what city you're targeting, and for the sake of my thoughts, it doesn't matter.

      What does your keyword research tell you about the phrase "NYC Photos" and the related keywords? do they get a decent enough amount of searches per month to make it worth going after them?

      Are they "buyer" keywords? Do people that search these terms want to buy prints, or are they really just looking for interesting photos in NYC? Are there other sites listed in those searches that are also (presumably) selling these prints? Or is it just cute picture sites?


      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post

      With my new website, I decided to learn from my past mistakes and laser focus on just one subject and a subject that wasn't as competitive as "landscapes". Living in a city that is a top 10 travel destination, I thought I would focus on the city and things that make that city unique. Part of my research was to look up competitive sites from New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, St Louis, and Washington DC. I looked at the best website from each city and tried to fashion the best parts together with my own flair. Each of these sites for each of these cities is on page one or page two of their respective Google Searches. This is what I want to do. By the way, if I may say so, my photographs are at least on par with their respective work.
      do you have 6 sites? or 1 site with 6 pages/categories with a category dedicated to each?

      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post

      I think your first sentence is straight and to the point; is SEO right for me and my Website? I don't know. What I do know is that for each page that has a photograph, also has a text block with a full description of the photograph. Is this enough in and of itself for SEO or do I need to be doing somehting else?
      Only your research (or paid research from someone else) will tell you if it's viable to go after SEO traffic for this. If "NYC photos" isn't a buyer keyword, why bother spending time or money to rank for something that isn't going to lead to sales.

      At the very least, there's no harm in on-site optimizing your individual pages. Make sure you have an H1 tag with a keyword phrase you want to rank for "Empire State Building Prints" and have some supporting text around it, which it sounds like you're doing. You don't have to write a book for every picture, but a full description of "Empire State Building - Morning" is probably not long enough.

      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post

      It's interesting that you mentioned "doesn't offer anything other than the unique quality that is YOU, the photographer." As I mentioned earlier, my previous website was my name and with this new site, I put the name of the city and "photographs" into web address name. LOL! I stripped out all personal identifiers and made it all about the city itself. Perhaps that was a mistake?
      Depends on what you're going for. "NYC Photographs" or the like is pretty generic. It's missing a "brand" is basically going for exact/partial match domain. It's at least got some potential to look seriously spammy and lack that personal feel that they're buying YOUR art instead of just looking at a collection of photos that could have been taken by any random person.



      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post

      I don't think SEO by itself is going to get me where I need to be. I think some type of advertising program is going to be important. Ultimately, I want my target audience to be corporate accounts, but in order to do that, I need get listed on A Google search. Thus where to go from here?

      How long does it take from my site to show up in a Google search . . . even if its page ten?

      What else should I be doing?
      Corporate accounts? Not sure what you're going for there. Are you looking for a single corporate company to buy ~5-10 prints, one for each conference room in their building to show their local attachment to the city? Or looking for clients to hire you to photograph their company buildings/machinery?

      That's a whole different realm than just looking for some random Google search of "NYC Photographs".

      As for how long it takes...how long is a piece of string? (Thanks to whomever I stole this response from!)

      It all depends on your keywords, competition, On-Site SEO, backlinks, etc.

      For very low competition stuff ("Empire State Building Lit Up At Night with an airplane flying overhead on a Tuesday") -- a day or less depending on how often Google is crawling and indexing your pages.

      For "New York Photos" - a search with 1.4 BILLION results...maybe never.
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    • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
      Originally Posted by itchhh2 View Post


      Blaine excellent question, I did submit my site map to Google.

      Maybe I should have expanded a bit on my earlier post. The link that I deposited in my first post is relevant to how you do a sitemap with attention payed to IMAGES per googles best practices.

      Also if you trying to promote photographs of cities and you're not geo tagging them up in a big way, along with incorporating the images into your sitemap you're cheating yourself from getting a lot of traffic.

      You need to google "geosetter" and download this free utility that geo-tags your images. Google loves that kind of stuff.

      After you download Geosetter, you need to google "geo setter tutorials" and watch the youtube videos that show you best how to use this nice little free program.

      Good luck with it !!
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