Focus on back link creation with good quality anchor text, and be sure that it has setup Google Webmaster Tools. Also, remember to request duplicate text pages, free of charge, for more content on site that is relevant to searches. It's up to you to provide the great content for your viewers and search engines to see. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the visibility of your website to search engines and potential viewers, and in search engine results. Many techniques can be utilized to aid in this effort. Below we offer some of the most fundamental tips and advice to get you started.
1) Create a search term strategy - Before diving into your site it is important to prioritize which terms and phrases are pertinent to your business and effective enough to begin driving traffic to your site. The word 'photographer' is popular and highly competitive but combined with other refining terms related to your unique style, location, medium, or subject matter you will have more effective search phrases. Take a step back and try to identify what sets you apart from your competitors, but also put yourself in the shoes of your viewer and consider what search phrases they might use to find you. We recommend building a list and prioritizing which top phrases you would like to rank highly for. You may also want to search those terms and see what sites rank highly and take a look at their website titles, descriptions, and content for additional inspiration.
2) Main website search info - To begin optimizing your website, edit the searchable content on your website beginning with the title, description, and keywords.
Title - Your website title appears both at the top of the browser window when your site is viewed as well as in the header for search results for you website. Your website title should be very concise, focusing on the most important of your key terms.
Description - This field allows you more room to elaborate on information about yourself and business. As a general guideline your description can range from a few words to a few sentences but should be coherent and focused. Viewers of search engine results will see the first few lines of your description so it is important that it not only is rich in your most desired search terms, but is also appealing to viewers to click on.
Keywords - Keywords in this area are considered to have very little importance to most search engines. The keyword field should be used for, redundancy, or any terms that were not included in your title and description and should be limited to 160 words or less.
* As a best practice we suggest a length of 70 characters for title, 170 characters for description, and generally 5-7 keywords be used.
3) Search landing page - We have added a specialized HTML page specifically aimed at helping you target rankings for specific keywords. The search landing page differs from the HTML ghost site in that it can be found and viewed through search engine results. Control of the content displayed on this page is accessed under the second tab at the top of the Search Engine Optimization module. The fields here can be filled out with variations on the information from the primary search info, used to diversify with more narrow terms, or focus on secondary facets of your business.
4) Portfolio naming - The names of your portfolios are reflected in the URLs of the HTML ghost site that the search engines crawl and index. It is important to consider how these names relate to the keywords you would like to have associated with your site. Portfolios with names such as portfolio1, portfolio2 are less likely to help you versus more specific titles such as: Architecture, Portraits, Corporate Headshots, or specific locations, etc.
5) Image Titles, Descriptions, and Keywords - Each image on your website is considered it's own page to search engines. If every image in one of your portfolios does not have any content in these fields, or if every image has the same content, search engines will not consider these pages important, or have any context as to which will be more relevant for any given search. Now that you have your overall website content optimized, and are utilizing the portfolio names to cover your broader subjects, it is ideal to add titles and descriptions to your images that appeal to more specific searches. Remember to keep each title short, and although titles and descriptions can be similar between images they should not be identical.
6) Page content - The information pages of your website provide a great place to add more text content about you and your services. Creating pages with specific search friendly titles and body content gives search engines more information about you and your services and well as more possible results to serve for specific searches.
7) Off-site efforts - One of the most important factors that contributes to your ranking is the amount and quality of inbound links to your website. Search engines pay careful attention to links and quality is definitely more important that quantity. Depending on your industry building inbound links can be done many ways with varying levels of effectiveness. Here are a few suggestions on ways to go about gaining more exposure and increasing your online presence:
- Directories: One should be careful when looking at listings in directories. Many free and paid directory services exist to artificially inflate search ranking. Focus efforts on higher quality curated listings. Connect with local businesses, newspapers, and industry related services.
- Blogs: Creating a blog offers you a forum to regularly add new content and engage your community. When setting up your own blog be sure to keep utilizing search friendly terms in your headings and body content that relate to your work and entice viewers. You may also leverage other blogs, by submitting guest posts, or commenting and engaging communities. Links coming from a blog post itself are of greater value than links in comments which are often considered 'spammy', but they may benefit you by driving traffic from other readers which in turn helps your rank.
- Social media: Expanding the avenues viewers may use to find and connect with you is almost always helpful. We recommend focusing on the networks that appeal to you and that you are comfortable using. Setting up accounts such as Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn profiles, tweeting followers, or establishing yourself Google+ locations and Yelp for business reviews all help increase your exposure and brand, increasing your visibility and maintaining connections with clients and peers. You may also consider utilizing media sharing platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, Vimeo, Youtube, and Pintrest to share images and videos which you can tag or keyword, and link back to your site.
8) Tracking - We highly recommend signing up for Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to track your website and see how people are finding you. https://www.google.com/analytics/ and https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
The above may take a little work but changes immediately alter the HTML that is displayed to search engines - giving you a great opportunity to improve your search ranking.
Please keep in mind that it is impossible to control what sections of information on your site any search engine may serve up for specific searches at any given time, or to predict when a site will be ranked and how often it will be revisited. Using the above tips is a great starting point for building your site SEO.