SEO STRATEGY GUIDE for the non-techy professional photographer INTRODUCTION Thi

SEO STRATEGY GUIDE for the non-techy professional photographer INTRODUCTION This guide is meant to give you a basic but strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it applies to Intothedarkroom websites. We hope that you will learn strategies and how to implement those strategies to help your website rank better in search engines. ACCESSABILITY PICK A STRATEGY IMPLIMENTING KEYWORDS 1 ACCESIBILITY WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A WEBSITE TO BE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED (SEO)? It all comes down to organization and the accessibility of your information by search engines. Search engines need to be able to read all of the information on your website and it reads it in a specific way. FLASH VS HTML Many people want to know why Flash websites are not SEO. To get a better understanding of this, we should first look at HTML websites and understand how they work. Traditional HTML websites are organized into pages that can be read easily by search engines one at a time. (ie: mysite.com/about, mysite.com/pricing, mysite. com/contact, etc). Because these pages are HTML, search engines have access to the information on this page. Traditional Flash websites, instead, are built as one file that lives at your domain (mywebsite.com). To understand traditional Flash websites better, imagine Flash as a closed container: this container holds all of your pages and information and search engines can’t see inside the container. This makes most Flash websites not SEO friendly...notice I said most. HOW ARE INTOTHEDARKROOM’S FLASH WEBSITES SEO? The reason our Flash websites have always been SEO, is because we have always separated the information from the Flash. We do not use Flash as a container, but rather a thin layer on top. We use Flash to make things pretty but always allow search engines to access the content. SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 1 YOU NEED A STRATEGY When you search for something in Google, you type in keywords until you find what you are looking for. It’s important to rank for the right keywords. If you have a website that is accessible but has all the wrong keywords, it is not going to do you any good. Therefore, you need to create a keyword strategy. PICK YOUR KEYWORDS “I put the keyword ‘weddings’ all over my website. Why don’t I come up in search results?” The word “weddings” is searched over 6 Million times per month. Because this term is such a broad term it is going to be highly competitive. You would have to beat companies like “TheKnot.com” to rank number one for this term. To pick your keywords, we recommend using the assistance of a free tool called Google Keywords (https:// adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool). This tool will show you the amount of searches each keyword phrase gets per month in Google. To pick good keywords, you want to have the right balance between high searches and your ability to win. It gets easier to find these keywords the more specific your keyword phrase gets. Let’s look at some examples. The term “wedding photographer” has 22,200 searches per month The term “hawaii wedding photographer” has 3,600 searches per month The term “John the wedding photographer” has 0 searches per month So you can see that the more specific the term gets, the less searches per month. Chances are, as a small business, you would have an easier time ranking for “hawaii wedding photographer” then “wedding photographer”. In addition, it would be pointless to rank for “John the wedding photographer” because it has little to no searches per month. The goal is to rank for a term that you can win and not only get on the first page, but within the first 3 spots. 2 PICK A STRATEGY SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 2 THIS IS A RACE TO THE TOP Getting on the first page of a search term that has value is great. But it will do you little to no good if you are not ranked as one of the top 3 search results. Let’s look at some general statistics. The first result gets about 30% of all the clicks. The second result gets about 12% of all the clicks The third result gets about 9% of all the clicks The tenth result gets about 2% of all the clicks As you can see, the best place to be is first place. So, now let’s look at how you can get there and how you can determine if you can beat the competition. 2 PICK A STRATEGY (CONT) SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 3 KEYWORD STUFFING The first mistake that many people make is called “keyword stuffing”. This is when you string a long list of comma separated keywords together on a page instead of writing a paragraph (looks like: wedding photographer, photography, san diego, california weddings, brides, etc, ). Will this cheat work? In the short term it probably will, but if someone implements good SEO practices, they will beat you in the long term. The truth is that Google doesn’t look favorably on keyword stuffing and ultimately is smarter than that. So now we are going to tell you some great ways to use your keywords. DOMAIN NAME/URL Having keywords in your domain name can help with SEO. This is a touchy subject, because most companies want to use their company name as their URL, not some long ugly keyword phrase. However, if SEO is not going to be your primary source of business, then it is understandable if you opt not to use keywords in your domain name. We just want you to be aware that this will help. META TAGS This is a place on your website that allows you to add a string of keywords that are associated with the content of that website or page. This is how people started to SEO a website many years ago. This has since become outdated and most experts believe it offers little to no value anymore. PAGE TITLES This is a big one. Search engines always look at the page title. If you are trying to rank for the keyword phrase “arizona wedding photographer” then it would make more sense to title your about page “arizona wedding photographer” instead of “my bio” or “about the photographer”. CONTENT IS KING If your page titles are keywords, but you do not give the search engines any content to read, then you are not giving the search engine any reason to believe that your page is important enough to rank. Therefore, you want 3 IMPLEMENTING KEYWORDS SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 4 to make sure that you write rich content on every page. What is rich content? Rich content is a paragraph that your readers are going to want to read that includes your keywords in a normal and casual way (no keyword stuffing). For example, your paragraph might start out with “I chose to be an Arizona wedding photographer because...”. Google wants to see content that is both relevant to the keywords and is interesting to your reader. In addition, the more content, the better. This is the reason that many photographers have added a blog to their website. Blogs allow you to create a huge archive of rich content that people want to read. IMAGES Don’t forget your images. Google cannot see images so it’s important to fill in the “alt” text when inserting them into your website. By doing so, you’ll be describing your images to Google, so it’s important to include your keywords here. Make sure, however, that you don’t use the same keyword/phrase for every image – mix it up a bit. Where you input this “alt” text depends on the platform you’re using for your website or blog. NAVIGATION BUTTONS Your navigation buttons are internal links that are on every page of your website. These internal links should utilize the same naming strategy as page titles. If you name these links with keywords, it helps Google group that page with the keyword being used. LINKS THAT POINT TO YOUR WEBSITE A contextual link (a keyword that is a hyperlink to your website) on another website is one of the most important things that can help your website rank in search engine results. Two things are important for a contextual link: the credibility of the website it’s coming from and the actual text in the link. So, ideally you want a link that reads “Arizona wedding photographer” from a reputable website like “TheKnot.com”, rather than a link that reads “click here” from a website like “spamwebsiteforum.com”. 3 IMPLEMENTING KEYWORDS (CONT) SEO Strategy Guide 2013 | www.intothedarkroom.com 5 EVALUATE YOUR COMPETITOR Hopefully you now have a general understanding of keywords and how to implement them into a website. With this knowledge you can now evaluate your competition. When looking at the competitors that appear in the search results, you can evaluate their page titles, content, URL, etc to see how worthy of an opponent they are. WILL I RANK uploads/Societe et culture/ seo-strategy-guide-for-the-non-techy-professional-photographer.pdf

• Détails
• Publié le Fev 12, 2021
• Catégorie Society and Cultur...
• Langue French
• Taille du fichier 0.1042MB