Optimizing your website for Google can seem like a daunting task, but if you take your time to put your site together and always think of how Google is going to look at your new window to the world, you’ll soon be on your way to a high Page Rank. First and foremost, you want to determine what your theme is going to be for your website. Are you going to share with the world all there is on how to take photos of cats? Maybe you want to have broader appeal and include all animals. Just remember, the more focused you are, the better you are able to bring your website to the forefront of the search results. David Hobby and his Strobist.com website is a great example of focusing on one particular aspect of photography, lighting with small portable flash. As of this writing, Hobby now has 200,000 mostly amateur photographers as devoted readers. His site attracts 1.6 million page views a month. His reported income is close to six figures, after only a mere 8 months.

So in thinking about your theme, it should always express the particular niche you have chosen for your website. One example is to have your title description describe your site. An example would be if you live in Cleveland and are promoting stock photography, you might want your title to not only have your website name, but the the following, “Stock photographer in Cleveland, Ohio”. Now that’s just a simple example, but you get the idea

Continue Reading

So what does this headline have to do with spider web marketing? Not a lot really, other than to illustrate a point about how to drive traffic to your website. I am going to share a little bit a of a secret that many bloggers and web masters are not aware of.

First, having a blog or a website as a photographer is critical to getting your name out there. I have been on the web since 1999, with some type of website sharing my photos. Being that photographers have a narcissistic side to us, we want to drive traffic to view our photos and share what we love to do. Getting those web hits up becomes all consuming at times, so we do all that we can to bring everyone to our little window on the internet. For me personally, I love photography, I think I’m good at it and I want to share it and maybe others will learn or be inspired. If not, they have a tens of millions of other links for those that love photography.

But how does one know what to do to bring the traffic in? Well, there are a number of ways, but I think I found one little secret that Google quietly introduced that will really help in your quest for eyeballs. Google Insights Search.

It is such an amazing application, to learn what the trends are based on what people search for on Google. Its really quite simple to use, put in your search term and all the magic data pops up, including

Interest over time - Set your time frame for your search term and it will graph the popularity of the term.

Regional Interest - See what countries or even states are most interested in your term. Plug in the word marketing just for fun and see what the top countries are… hint, one is Nigeria.

Using the graph below, I plugged in wedding photographer as a search term and you can see the search starts spiking at the end of the year, right around the middle of December. So if you have a wedding Photography business, marketing in December probably makes a lot of sense. I would have thought it  more important to ramp up your marketing in April or May, but December?

Continue Reading