Search engines are super complex in the way they rank and serve results but there are two basics factors that are used by most of them, including the big boss of them all, Google.
These factors are:
- Relevancy – which is how well your pages use technology to describe what you want to show.
- Authority – which is how popular your pages and your domain are on web.
Search Engines Give Higher Rankings To Authority Photography Websites
Ordering websites by popularity or authority is something that was invented by Google. So how can they measure the popularity of a website?
Links, Links, Links
The quality and the amount of inbound links to your website from other external websites is what makes a website or page popular.
- Links from higher ranking websites are of higher quality
- The more quality links, the better
- Links coming from websites related to your topic are better (like other photography blogs)
- Low quality links like those coming from spam websites are worthless
Facebook, Twitter and Google+ Count As Well
Search engines use signals like the amount of people following you on Facebook or Twitter, or the amount of retweets, likes and +1′s your webpages have. The more social your pages are, the better!
Also, with Google+ the web search is becoming even more social. For example, did you know that if you’re searching for wedding photographer in London and a friend of yours on a Facebook likes and shares a link from a wedding photographer in London, that exact page will appear on the first page of your search results?
Domain and Page Popularity
Domain popularity (or authority) takes into account the total amount and quality of links to your website.
Page popularity takes into account the total amount and quality of links for a specific page, only.
Each link you get to any page of your photography website improves the domain authority, which in turn helps all the pages of your website ranking higher.
[jbox color="blue"]A specific page of your website will rank on first place for a specific keyword when its domain and page authority sum outranks all the other pages on the internet.[/jbox]
Search Engines Give Higher Rankings To Relevant Photography Websites
In order to rank for a specific set of keywords you have to make sure that your website is relevant to those keywords. Search engines can only read the text on your web pages so you’ll have to use text (and the HTML tags) in the best way possible in order to correctly describe your content.
Search engines need to know exactly what your pages are about
Photographers usually don’t pay too much attention to text and that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to make a photography website relevant to a specific set of keywords.
- Use the ALT tag in your photos and make sure it has the keywords your targeting
- Use the HTML Title tag
- Use Header tags
- Use good information hierarchy (having the least amount of links possible between the homepage and the content)
- Don’t duplicate your content (having various pages with almost the same text counts as duplicate)
Link Relevancy for Photography Websites
When you link to a website, you use a string of text made out of words. Search engines follow these links and save these keywords on their extensive databases associating them with your page.
If 10 different bloggers link to your page with the same keywords, a search engine will assume that your page is about those keywords. When you get the possibility of linking to your website, use the right keywords.
The Perfect SEO Page
The perfect SEO page combines the relevancy and importance factors into a super optimized page.
It should make the right use of HTML tags such as the page title, image ALT and the header tags to make sure it’s relevant to its topic. It also has lots of inbound links from quality websites, its fully integrated with social media and has a bunch of likes, tweets and+1′s, and it has great content, obviously!
You’re ready to dominate the world, now!
Many thanks.
I have read this page but am a bit of a luddite when it comes to the techie stuff. My website is on the first page of Google but if you could have a look at it and suggest ways I could improve it that would be great. You might enjoy the images.
Regards
George
Hi George! I do enjoy your images very much. Wildlife and nature photography is my favorite type of photography.
Regarding your website there’s a lot of room for improvement.
In order of importance:
1. There’s too much steps from the homepage to the actual images (you should aim to 2 or 3 links maximum). Cut the page where you choose Environment or Deer, merge those two pages into one page only.
2. You should use a Blog for the New Stuff, it’s easier to update and gets you a lot more visitors to your website, in general. Check with your website service to see if it’s possible to use a blog.
3. There’s no social media (Facebook, Twitter) buttons in your gallery. That’s a big mistake! Check with your website service.
4. Your portfolio navigation is not the best, in my opinion, especially in the thumbnail view. The thumbnails are not using most space. Actually, your whole website theme does not make the best use of space. This is not bad for search engines but can affect its usability for people.
You’re making good use of the ALT tags in the photos. Keep up with that and keep adding more photos and text!
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
Peter
I have tried the SEO tips in this article and it seems to be working, I am on page 2 of inland empire wedding photographer, in which before it was not even searchable at all. I will try the linking in stuff (backlinks?) not sure if backlinks and sites linking in to your site is the same thing? But thank you again.
Matt,
DeVende Photography