Here at Veil & Train we have found that many photographers are unaware that simply publishing pictures to a portfolio website does not form a strong enough online business strategy. Attention has to be paid to an effective internet marketing (IM) plan – without it you’ll go virtually unnoticed.

Here I’ll give you some top tips on increasing your chances of getting noticed through the e-clamor by the right people online – art directors, ad agencies, art buyers – the ultimate goal in building a successful online presence for your photography business.

First in this series is a quick ‘how to’ on Search Engine Marketing – subscribe to the Veil & Train feed so you don’t miss the upcoming Social Media Marketing and Blog Marketing articles.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

SEM is the promotion of your website by increasing is visibility (pagerank) on popular search engines. This is achieved through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies. These SEO strategies include:

• Use of meta tag ‘keyword’ – choose good keywords to describe your site and more specifically your specialities. The keyword ‘photography’ is far too broad = 376,000,000 references on Google! Try thinking about your strengths, be more niche e.g ‘abstract photography’ = a mere 171,000 references, ‘abstract tree photography’ = 7. Try the free tools at SEOBook or KeyWordDiscovery for more keyword help.
• Avoid ‘splash pages’ or ‘click to enter’ as the top level page on your site, also avoid website designs based round HTML frames. Splash pages are a main entry page with either a large graphic image and a link instructing visitors to “enter” a Web site; or a Flash animation with a link to skip the animation, and a redirect to a new Web page after the animation is completed. You really want your top level page to act as a table of contents for the rest of the site. Splash pages lack keyword rich text and anchor text apart from maybe ‘skip intro’. Most search engines ignore redirects, splash pages are generally based on redirects.
• Do not publish a website that says it is ‘under construction’, you might find it gets indexed in this state and it will not get re-indexed when the real content appears
• Most photographers have little or no copy whatsoever on their pages. Write and design your site using the words your target audience types into search queries – keep your portfolio and gallery sections away from the top level pages, as good as search engines are they can not tell what type of photographer you are from your images.
• Avoid Flash for the same reasons mentioned above, although you may have typed loads about yourself in your 100% flash based site, the search engines won’t be able to see a single word of it. It’s a movie, search engines can’t retrieve words from movies either.
• Keep a check on your linked referrers – a link from another page to your own website should contain keywords in with the anchor text of the link. Google weights its Search Engine Results pages towards the anchor text of links to a page.
• Tag your gallery/portfolio images with keywords – this will help search engines that have image search features pick up your images – after all your images are your product, make sure they get indexed too.
• Submit your URL to the search engines – you can either do this manually, use a free submitter service such as Submit Express or use a paid service like the one provided by NamesCo (clicking this link supports photosavings)
• Improve your page rank through link exchange with other bloggers and websites in your specialist area of photography. Google favours anchor text when indexing websites, so the more websites your URL appears on the better your Google PageRank.

Where do I go for more information? The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) is a non profit industry organization for search engine marketing. SEMPO’s mission is primarily one of education – to demystify the various aspects of search marketing, to drive awareness of its incredible efficiency and marketing potential, and to help members and nonmembers to grow as professionals.

Finally give the SEO Page Tester Tool below a try, enter your URL and the keyword to test and see how your website performs. One of my favourites is “London Wedding Photographer”.

Is your web page optimized? Test it now: URL: (Example: www.domain.com) Keyword: Web site promotion tools