So you’ve got a photography web site and want to get it to the top of the listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The first thing you need to know is to forget Yahoo and MSN. They are losing the Search Engine War and their share of SEARCHES is on the decline. GOOGLE is king and looks set to dominate the market for some time to come. MSN’s attempt to build their search feature into Windows has not done anything to increase their market share, rather MSN’s share of Search fell to 10.9%, Yahoo had 21.4% against Google’s 49%
So lesson number one concentrate you SEO efforts on Google.

Next thing, forget FLASH. FLASH packages a web site in lots of code that Search Engine Spiders/robots cannot read. When a Spider crawls a site it is looking for content text written in plain old HTML. FLASH – forget it.

2nd build your site with Keywords. First thing to do is decide what your keywords are going to be. In the case of SDBPHOTO.COM our keywords are: “hong kong photographer/photography”. Now the most important place to use these Keywords is first in the TITLE HEADING of the page. So many photographers title their pages “Jo’s Photography Gallery”. Now how many people do you think would search for this. Use keyword terms that people will search for. If you are a wedding photographer in Santa Maria. Title your page “Santa Maria Wedding Photographer”.

You will then want to repeat these keywords again in the metatags: Keywords & Description. While not given very much weight in the SERP’s these days, they are still important. Take two sites with the same PageRank, one with MetaTags, the other without. The page with the MetaTags is going to rank higher…

Then use your keywords again in the actual body text of the pages. Beware not to use them too many times. This is called Spamming and will get your site booted out of the SERP’s, you don’t want that. Use a Keyword Density Analyser to check the density of any given keyword in relation to the rest of the content on your site.

When building your internal links, the text you use in the anchor is also important. Try using the page title as the anchor text when you create your links.

And a few more tricks I have up my sleeve that I am not going to give away as my competition is sure to be reading this.
Internally the structure of a site is very important to the way a SPIDER crawls your site. Built properly a site with a lower PR will outrank a page with a higher PR, purely due to the structure of the site.

The most important determination of PageRank is how the site is linked to the rest of the web. INBOUND LINKS are king. The more the better. Trading links with other sites is a common way to build links and many SEO specialists spend lots of time and effort cultivating links with other sites. But not all links are created equal. Link Farms are sites that have been created purely for the purpose of achieving higher PR, Google does not like LinkFarms and sites have been know to be penalised for participating in LinkFarms. Be sure to screen your link partners carefully. A well optimised site with a number of good quality inbound links is what we are aiming for here. Linking from sites with higher PR will result in a higher PR for your site. It is all based on the theory of “votes” to your page. Google, how de mo crat ic (dont want to get censored) of them… now if they only could get the Chi knees to vote…

Of particular interest will be how you tag (file name) the photos on your site. The logo on my site which appears on everypage called from the server is named with my keywords. If you have a gallery site with many pages, you should have each page linked back to the index page of your site with your keywords as the anchor text.

Good sources of SEO info, forget any books, by the time they get to the presses the info they contain is dated at best, obsolete at worst. The web has a wealth of SEO sites and user forums. Good ones to check are:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/

http://www.seochat.com/

http://www.webmasterworld.com/

Of particular interest to photographers http://www.webmasterworld.com/ has a section on PPC (pay per click) advertising. PPC for photographers will be covered in the next chapter.
With your site ranking high in the SERP’s people will be able to find you and your business will grow.

Since achieving #1 position for my keywords about a year ago, this site has gone from 80-100 visitors a day to currently receiving 250-400 visitors a day. Most importantly our non-web business has increased by at least 50%. You could not buy the publicity that #1 in Google brings to a site in a highly competitive market such as Hong Kong.

To close. My site has been live for a little over four years. It was only late in 2004 that I took an interest in SEO and started the climb up the SERP’s, it took a little over six months to hit #1 in Google, we stayed there for about 6 months and then were bumped to #3, a reworking and revision of the site as well as the cultivation of some more links and we were soon back in #1 where we have been for the last 9 months. This site is PR 4 and has over 500 inbound links, and has indexed more than 3000 pages and building…
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Search Engine Optimization is a very thorough process and can be complicated. This article will definitely not teach you everything but it will point out some very important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO).

Now before I get started I need to point out a few things. You can not just throw up any webpage use SEO tactics on it and get it to a number one position in the search engines. Your website needs good quality content and needs to be resourceful to users. Also you can not have an affiliate site nor a forwarded domain. Search engines pick up on these sites and never list them. This has to be your very own site with good quality content and your own domain name.

Once all of the above are true you will be able to proceed to performing the following SEO tactics on your website. One important note is that it should be done in this particular order for simplicity and to save yourself the time of realizing that you did so much work for no reason:

For search engine optimization you should take these steps and in this particular order:

1.Find out the most important keywords that you would like your website to show up in, in a search engine. Make sure your website is related to those keywords (this is a biggie).

2.Now what you want to do is include those keywords in your website as much as possible without actually “spamming” your site with the keywords. So don’t stick the keywords where they do not belong make sure they are strategically placed.

3.You should include those keywords in the title and description of your website at least once but no more than 3 times.

4.Try to fit the keywords in the body of your website as many times as possible without sounding repetitive.

5.It is a good idea to have the keywords in your domain name, but as you already have domains you shouldn’t worry about this.

6.Any objects on your website (ie. audio, graphics, videos, etc.), should have alternate text that includes your keywords.

7.Another important place to include your keywords is the meta tags of your webpage. Meta tags are not visible to the viewer but are to the search engines. Make sure to include your keywords in your meta tags as much as possible.

8.The last and most important thing in search engine optimization (and this isn’t really search engine optimization per say) is to get backlinks to your webpage. The more links you get the better PR(pagerank) your site will get and the higher up the search engine rankings your site will go.

I hope this will help whoever applies these method. This is by far no guide on full out SEO tactics but it is a start and some of the aforementioned is very important when it comes to SEO.
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