All these are extremely useful pointers to help attain a high rank in Google. But because search engine crawlers can only read text, they leave out some of the most important aspects of your site—those beautiful images and graphics. With the right search engine optimization techniques, however, those visual elements can significantly improve your search engine ranking.

Let’s make your photos work to optimize your site through these simple techniques:

1. Reduce your file size.

Search engines rank sites that load quickly during a search higher than those that don’t. Web content with heavy file sizes such as photos can bog downloading speed.

To hasten the loading speed, reduce the file size of your photos. After editing or enhancing your images, you can use an online compression tool like Compress JPEG or TinyPNG. Just upload your visuals, and the tool will do the rest.

2. Use thumbnails.

You may want to retain the quality and size of your images for more impressive views. For this, you may opt to use thumbnails in your website’s gallery.

Thumbnails allow your page to load quickly. If the user finds a thumbnail that looks particularly interesting, he can click on it for a full view of the image.

You can create thumbnails via Photoshop or online photo editors such as PicMonkey, Fotor, Pixlr, or GIMP.

3. Rename your images.

Your camera automatically labels images as a series of letters and numbers. For example, it might be labeled as “DSCN0001.” For search engines, this does not make sense, and this makes it harder for crawlers to find the image.

A better way is to rename the image to something that actually describes the image. For example, rather than “DSCN0001,” you can rename it to “Two-Floor House in Miami” or “Property in Miami.”

4. Include alt text.

Technically, search engines can only read text. That means they are unable to “see” photos. Thus, to enable robots to crawl over and index your photos, you need to describe your image with alt, or alternative text.

Alt-text is added in the HTML code. Below is an example of an image’s HTML code with the alt text “two-floor house in Miami.” The search engine crawlers may not be able to see your images, but they can read and index “Two-floor house in Miami.”

The alt tag is located in the image source code (encircled in red). You can see and edit the alt tag by using the HTML text view of your CMS (content management system). The photo below indicates an example using a WordPress CMS.

Often, alt text is highlighted when the cursor hovers over the image. They are displayed when browsers have problems in rendering the images, usually due to slow internet speed. Alt-text is also used by visually impaired people who have trouble viewing images.

5. Caption your images.

Captions tell a story behind the photo, add more information about the image and encourage readers to take action. In essence, it makes a photo more interesting.

Because search engine crawlers read text, including a caption, makes the photo search engine friendly.

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6. Use the right keywords.

As much as possible, include strategic keywords in your alt text, image title, and the text near the image. You can determine the right keywords by using online tools such as Google Adwords, Google Trends, Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, SEMRush, and more.

Check out this article about how to use keywords correctly.

7. Keep your text short and concise.

As much as possible, descriptions and captions should be no more than 60 characters, including spaces. That’s because Google truncates, or cuts, any character beyond that length.

If a lengthier text is desired, make sure that the keyword is somewhere at the beginning of the phrase.

8. Use image sitemaps.

Image sitemaps allow search engines crawlers to find information about images more easily. They also enable crawlers to find images that are loaded using JavaScript, which is usually the case with slider galleries and product images.

You can add the image information in your website’s existing sitemap, or you can have a separate sitemap for your images.

For more information about image sitemaps, check out this link.

9. Be wary with third-party image hosting.

Many people use third-party image hosting services such as Photobucket, Imgur, and Postimage to store and link their photos. The advantage of this method is that it saves you space and reduces the overall bandwidth that your site uses.

However, if the hosting services are overwhelmed with massive amounts of traffic or if their servers experience a problem, your images may not show up, get blocked, or even be deleted. Due to this problem, you might want to use your own server to host your images.

10. Use social media to promote your images.

Social media has a vital role in your SEO as well as your customer acquisition and retention strategy. By regularly sharing your images on your social media accounts, you extend your reach, promote your services, and tap into new markets.

Check out this article for tips on using social media to improve your reach.

Header photos, pictures that accompany articles, galleries, and product images are not just for eye candy or promotion. They are also important tools that could help in your SEO.

But as a photographer, do you really need SEO to make your site appear in search engines? After all, you have top-quality photos that are sure to attract prospects. In addition, your website’s hosting company is responsible for your SEO and online marketing, right? Nope, wrong.

SEO definitely matters! In the competitive world of internet marketing, your website falls farther in the search results without a sound SEO strategy. Ultimately, viewers won’t be able to find your business.

Here is the list of reasons why you should care about SEO when it comes to your online marketing strategy.

1. The simple truth of online marketing is that if your business can’t be found, you could be missing out on valuable business.

There are so many companies promoting their business online and the competition to be “#1 on Google” is extremely fierce. Innovative website marketing is required to make your business stand out, and SEO is the primary way to ensure your website is being seen by your potential clients.

2. The right SEO techniques attract the right client.

You see, a lot of prospects are looking for the right photographer who can address their specific requirements. And hopefully, you’re that photographer! However, you lose that opportunity if they cannot find you when they search online.

Knowing what your target market is looking for is important. This is where the right keywords come into play. A keyword is a word or phrase that is inserted in your web content that makes it possible for people to find your website by using a search engine. If your website is well optimized, the search engine will display the page where that particular keyword is located.

If you know the keywords your viewers are searching for in Google, you can incorporate those keywords in your content in a natural way.

As Google indexes and ranks your pages for those target keywords, your site becomes more visible. Subsequently, you will draw visitors that match the profile of your ideal clients.

3. Content is king.

Content is everything you publish in your website—text, video and audio clips, photos, infographics, and more. People—and search engines—love to read, view, or listen to content that is interesting, useful, and addresses their specific needs. Quality updated content can easily put your page on the first page of a search engine results page (SERP).

Google crawls over the internet searching for new content, so it is important to regularly update your content. If your content sits and does not get updated regularly, Google loses interest in your website, resulting in decreasing your SERP ranking.

4.  A lot of photographers believe that Google does the SEO.

This is definitely not true, and many photographers have lost potential prospects and opportunities due to this belief. To rely on this myth is like having a garage sale without marketing it. No one will come because nobody will know about it But, if you hang signs throughout the neighborhood to let people know that you are having a garage sale and you have great things to sell, then neighbors will be much more likely to come and people may even tell friends and family about your amazing garage sale.

In a nutshell, Google’s work and responsibility are to search your site, index your pages, and calculate your ranking. But improving your chances for better ranking is totally up to you. This can be done through SEO techniques such as publishing quality content, adding strategic keywords, and more.

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5. Properly executed SEO allows your website to rank higher in Google’s results.

Studies show that if your page is positioned on the first page of SERP, around 80 to 90 percent of viewers will most likely visit your site. About 14.6% will possibly become customers (Source: http://growthlightning.com/5-reasons-why-seo-matters/).

6. As mentioned in the previous point, it is very difficult to determine how many people actually visit your site or convert to customers with social media likes, tweets, pins, and the like.

Results from your website’s organic SEO, however, are easy to track with the use of Google Analytics. With such a tool, you can see how many customers are visiting your website, how many views you are getting over a certain period of time, what keywords they are using, and other important information. You can even see real-time analytics as potential clients view your website and look through your content (kinda creepy, huh?).

Using this data, you can form strategies to make your website rank higher or be more visible in search engines.

7. With a bit of know-how (or assistance from an SEO expert), you can re-direct pages, add meta descriptions (meta descriptions are short snippets, specifically tags in the HTML, that summarize the content of a page.), strategically place and regulate keywords, and more.

In other words, you have the ability and freedom to customize your content to make it search engine friendly. In addition, your most popular pages/content tend to stay in SERP for a long time, making SEO an excellent strategy for long-term benefits. We even have articles written and published several years ago that are still being visited today!

Many photographers feel that they only need social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and good ole’ word of mouth. These channels are effective marketing tools, but they’re only good for the short term. Let’s assume you rely 100% on Instagram to market your photos. What if, one day, Instagram is replaced by a different channel?

Also, unless you pay an advertising fee, most of the time, your social media updates are visible only to your contacts, followers, and subscribers. What about those who do not know about your business yet? What about those who haven’t subscribed to your social media accounts yet?

This is not to say that social media is inferior to SEO; it can actually be an important component of your SEO strategy.

8.  Your competitors are probably utilizing SEO to their advantage.

This is especially true for photographers who are tech- and web-savvy. Photographers know the value of spending time on their search engine strategy. Fortunately, you can catch up as long as you take SEO seriously and dedicate time to improving the content you are posting on your website. Combined with effective keyword research and social media marketing, your website will soar up to the first page of Google and other search engines before you know it!.

As you can see, SEO definitely does matter. Search engine optimization is an essential part of any company’s business plan/strategy in today’s day and age. Done properly, you can and will start to see real results. Of course, this does not happen overnight. Improving your SEO and SERP ranking takes time, so get started today in order to help drive more traffic to your website and help you get your business in front of new potential clients. Good luck!

But what is SEO? Technically, it is a series of methodologies and techniques that aim to significantly improve the visibility of a web page in a search engine’s (specifically Google) unpaid, or organic, results. Effectively implemented, SEO enables a web page to appear first in a search engine results page (SERP) when a certain keyword or key phrase is searched. In SEO terminology, this position is called a rank.

When a page is ranked high or is on the first page of a SERP, people are more likely to click it. The more visitors the page receives, the more chances these visitors can be converted into customers, loyal followers, or regular readers.

Simple, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t straightforward as it sounds, but it isn’t too complicated either. Discussing the nitty-gritty of SEO strategies is beyond the scope of this post and will take several articles to do so.

So, let us give you a basic knowledge of how SEO works by checking out the infographic below:

Step 1: Publication of web pages

Everything starts with publishing your website. Each page on your website is a unique, distinct, and specific entity as far as Google is concerned. A home page is an example of a single page.

An important thing to note is that Google does not index, or list, websites as a whole; it indexes individual pages that make up the site. With this principle, it is important to optimize the individual pages of your website. It is also vital to think about the structure of your site in its entirety. How your pages are connected to others through internal links gives Google an idea of how your content relates to each other.

Step 2: Search engine robots crawl over your page

Even if you have published your pages, Google needs to be able to find them. It does this by sending out search engine robots, often called crawlers or spiders. These are programs that collect every word in every page of your site. These robots also follow any inbound or outbound links to discover as much information as possible about your website. This is the reason why link building in SEO is important.

Robots are restricted to reading text; they cannot “see” images, sound clips, and videos. For this reason, you should add supporting alt text and captions so robots can crawl on non-text content as well.

Robots then report to the main search engine index, and the data they gathered is analyzed using a complex set of algorithms. These algorithms are formulas that the search engines use to determine the significance of a page, based on the question or keyword that people are searching for.

Step 3: Search engine uses algorithms to determine your rank

After the search engine interprets and evaluates the robots’ data through its algorithms, it now has an idea of the main keywords in each of your site’s page, how relevant your pages are in relation to similar sites, and how much authority is assigned to your pages.

Authority, by the way, is the relative importance of your page. It is determined by various metrics. Such metrics may include the quality of external links (i.e. pages that link to yours), the influence of websites linking to you, the text in your meta description, and more.

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Step 4: Search engine indexes your page

With no problems or issues, your page is now ranked and indexed in the search engine. In the real world, people are looking for photographers to take photos of their projects or events. In order to find photographers in their area, people use search engines to look for the right photographer for their specific needs.

The keyword here is “right photographer.” Thus, they will be typing keywords for their search. Most likely, they will type specific keywords rather than general ones. Such specific keywords may include a category (e.g., wedding photographers, real estate photographers), a geographical component (e.g. wedding photographers in Grand Rapids, real estate photographers in Miami), and more.

Step 5: Search engine displays your web page in its SERP (search engine results page)

If you have properly optimized your page, it should appear in a SERP when people begin searching for your service in Google (or other search engines).

But keywords are just the beginning. There are other factors that determine how your web pages will rank. Factors such as user behavior, quality of natural links from other websites, social sharing, and more all contribute to your site’s ranking.

In addition, keeping your website updated is important. Google “loses interest” in your website if its robots do not have something new to read. One way to keep your site updated is by including a blog on your website; Google loves updated blog posts! Regularly published content, articles, and posts that users find valuable, relevant, and useful definitely help push your site to the top of search results.

Let’s do an analogy. Imagine a restaurant that has never changed its menu or ambiance for more than a decade. They never introduced specials or promos. Nothing new and exciting has been introduced for a long time. Would you think a lot of people would go to such a place? Probably not that many.

Given enough time and searches, your page can land in the first page of a SERP.

Remember that the more value people find in your content, the more people will be willing to read and share it. Subsequently, you will generate more traffic to your website and increase your ranking.

That is basically what SEO is all about. As you can see, the concept is pretty simple. Now, it’s up to you or an SEO expert on how to make these techniques work for your photography website.

1. Create an account and post your photos on image bookmarking sites.

Image bookmarking sites such as Instagram, Fotki, Flickr, and Pinterest are very effective in showcasing your work. Don’t forget to put a link to your website from your image bookmarking page.

2. Submit your website link in directories.

Directories such as Reddit, DMOZ, and Hotfrog allow your website to be easily searchable. They do this by organizing links into different categories and subcategories. Thus, users who are looking for websites about photography in web directories may stumble upon your link.

Setting up an account in these directories is easy; just sign up then input your name, email address, and other information needed by the directory. The directories will do the rest. You can also customize directories to auto-update whenever you add new content to your website.

Sites like Houzz, Behance, and Freelancer are great directories for real estate photographers.

Just for reference, here are brief descriptions of the examples of directories as stated above.

* Reddit – allows registered community members to submit text posts and direct links. Registered users can then rank and organize posts by voting submissions.
* DMOZ – a multi-content directory of links. Open content refers to content that others can copy or modify.
* Hotfrog – an Australian web directory that categorizes websites regionally and topically.
* Houzz – an online community of architects, interior designers, decorators, landscapers, handymen, contractors, and of course, real estate photographers
* Behance – a great directory for self-promotion. You can create and display your portfolio here.
* Freelancer – an ideal directory for freelancers to advertise their skills and services. Businesses looking for freelancers look for providers here.

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3. Use social media to promote your website.

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are currently some of the biggest social media sites. Take advantage of them by creating accounts for your photography business. Social media not only expands your reach but it also allows you to interact with your market one-on-one. You can also make accounts on other photo-heavy social media sites such as Digg and Tumblr. They are very popular among photographers.

Post images links to articles, announcements, and more on these accounts. Don’t forget to link to these accounts on your website and share them with your target audience to keep them up to date on your latest projects.

Daily posting is highly recommended, but 1 to 2 posts a week will do just fine. Some platforms such as Facebook have features that allow you to automatically schedule the publication of posts.

You can also use tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to aggregate your social media accounts and posts from one place.

Remember that the number of quality links that you have from trusted sources and social media accounts will definitely help your SEO. They build credibility for your website, your social media accounts, and ultimately, you as a professional.

4. Invite others to submit guest posts.

Inviting photobloggers, manufacturers, and writers to publish a guest post on your website is beneficial. Once you publish their article, they will share the link to their networks. Clicking the link will bring their network to your blog, which drives traffic, increases the number of natural links, and improves your rank in a search engine results page, or SERP.

If you want your photography business to reach new heights, then optimizing your website should be on your must-do list. Check out Part 1 for using keywords correctly and Part 2 for tips in link building. These strategic and effective SEO techniques can get your site in the front line and help establish your business a strong foothold in the competitive realm of online marketing.

1. Make sure your images are search-engine friendly.

The images themselves are important for effective Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. To ensure Google indexes them, place them in strategic positions such as the top of a page. Google also favors images that load fast, so compress your files so they will load quickly. In general, 30 to 50KB is recommended.

Finally, know that Google puts relevance on large images.

You can use the following tools to check if your pages—and images—are optimized.

1. SEO Site Checkup
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
3. GTmetrix
4. WebPageTest

2. Gather enough quality links.

With enough quality links, you can rank up a search engine results page, or SERP. A link is a reference to a web page that the user can directly follow or access by clicking the text. A link may point to an entire site or page, or a specific element within a page.

Competitive keywords and phrases need around 50 to 100 links for you to rank while minor ones take a dozen or so. Each link to your site from another site will help you move up the page.

But note that the key here is “quality.” Such links should be helpful and related to your business. For example, in the photography industry, links from photography websites, popular and trusted online resources, or articles about you and your company are examples of relevant, quality links. Links from unrelated websites, link farms, and low-value resources will not add value or help with your website’s SEO.

Next, you will need to develop a sound link-building strategy. But first, how do you get relevant, quality links?

You can increase the number of quality links to your website by doing the following:

1. Write guest blog posts and articles for fellow photographers.  Make sure that these blogs have links back to your website and vice versa.
2. Link to all your social media accounts.
3. Join Facebook Groups related to your business and share your articles in these groups.
4. Link to any article or content where you or your work is mentioned or shown.
5. Look for other helpful sources that are not competitors and link to their content. Of course, you will want to ask the contact person or company to link back to you.

3. Stick to a link-building schedule.

Schedule two or three hours a week for getting a link to your site. Why do you need a consistent schedule? Well, success doesn’t happen overnight, and you need to continuously build links to continue to improve your SEO and SERP ranking.

As a benchmark, we recommend at least one high-quality article that contains one high-quality link per month. Although, as you might imagine, the more you are able to post and link back to your website, the better and more effective your link-building will be.

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After determining your schedule, list potential sources where you can acquire a link and send them a proposal for a link exchange. Here are some suggestions:

1. Top photography blogs that accept contributed articles
2. Photography gear manufacturers websites
3. Vendor or partner sites
4. Online photography magazines and news sites
5. Websites of local photography clubs and organizations
6. Business and photo contest sites
7. Online community groups and forums about photography

Link building is more than just an SEO technique. Since it involves communication between two parties, it also gives you an opportunity to develop mutually beneficial relationships and expand your network.

4. Attach your blog to your website.

Your photography website does not need to be just a portfolio and information about your business. If you have a blog, you should attach it to your website too. If you don’t have one, start one now! A blog is one of the most important assets of any website.

1. Add life, color, and a personal touch to your website through your blog. You can create a blog post for every shoot, which tells your readers about your experiences, tips, etc. about the shoot. This can also act as your living portfolio that new/potential clients can check out before hiring you.
2. Your blog posts can generate related keywords, which can help rank your articles. For example, you can insert keywords related to your style of photography, the location of your shoots, and more.
3. Maintaining a blog by regularly posting new content makes your site SEO-friendly. Google ranks pages on how often they are updated. A weekly publication, for example, allows Google to see your site as “active.” Consistency and sticking to a schedule will help your SEO and increase page rank over time.
4. Blog posts act like gateways. Readers who find your blog post in search engines or elsewhere can trace their way back to your website.
5. You can write blog posts on other related topics and include keywords that are organic. In that way, these related posts draw people to your website.
6. You can publish gear reviews, tips, promos, and other useful information that photography enthusiasts would love to read.
7. You can write personal stories which make you a more interesting photographer.

Make sure your blog is in the same domain as your photography website so that you can take advantage of the links and traffic that you have built up in your blog.

Let’s move on to Part 3. There, you will find tips about how to effectively use social media to improve your online presence.

You can just imagine the thousands of photography websites around. To stand out from the rest, you need to incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website. Why does SEO matter? How does SEO work? How do you increase your website’s SEO?

With the right SEO techniques, you can:

1. Attract the right target market
2. Increase traffic to your website, which helps to acquire more clients
3. Develop a client base that can refer you to even more prospects
4. Reduce paid advertising and subsequently, save money
5. Establish yourself as a credible and authoritative entity in your industry
6. Get connected with influencers in your industry
7. Provide great value to your clients
8. Answer common questions your clients or leads are asking

That’s a lot of advantages you can enjoy! So let’s start optimizing your photography website by following these useful and proven tips.

1. Insert keywords in your website’s page titles.

Check out your main page titles. Do they contain essential keywords? Do they describe exactly what the page is?

EXAMPLE: Rather than “How to be a Better Photographer” which is vague and too general, use the title “Tips in Becoming an Effective Real Estate Photographer.” The keyword being inserted is “real estate photographer,” which is easily crawled by search engine bots.

Also, rather than force keywords or search-friendly titles on existing pages, why not create new, search-engine friendly, and keyword-optimized pages? Each page that ranks in a search engine is like opening a new gateway to your website.

EXAMPLE: Let’s use the same keyword in the example above. Rather than inserting “real estate photographer” in an existing article or web content, create a new page or an article about essential photography gear or necessary skills that a professional real estate photographer should have.

2. Use the right keywords to optimize images.

You might think that only text-heavy websites use keywords to improve their online visibility. But no, the same principle also applies to image-rich websites. Thus, insert keywords in the following sections of your images:

• image title
• alt tags
• filename of the image
• text near the image

HINT: If you are using captions (and you should), include keywords here as well.

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3. Use long-tail keywords.

Most likely, you won’t rank favorably for competitive keywords, at least not right away. That is due to the saturation of competition. Being a new player in the space, your content will take some time and traffic in order to gain traction.

A good option is to utilize longer phrases that include multiple competitive keywords; in SEO terminology, these phrases are called long-tail keywords. They include three or four keywords that are very specific to what you are selling or offering. Long-term keywords are a good option since specific multi-word phrases have the tendency to rank well and more easily than generic single- or double-word keywords.

REMINDER: Make sure your caption, title, or description isn’t more than 60 characters, including spaces. This is because search engines, like Google and Bing, truncate phrases and sentences that go beyond this limit.

Let’s consider the title “Tips in Becoming an Effective Real Estate Photographer.” It has 54 characters, including spaces, which is adequate. Do not use “Excellent Tips in Becoming an Effective and Award-Winning Real Estate Photographer” as it has a character count of 82, including spaces. Google will truncate it at the 60th character.

Also, remember that the idea of keywords is to target words or phrases that people might type into Google or another search engine. While you might not rank favorably for “Boston Wedding Photographer”, you might have a better shot with a long-tail keyword phrase like “outdoor wedding at Boston golf course”. This is something a person looking to get married outside at a golf course near Boston might actually type in their search engine. Always remember that you should only use these long-tail keywords when appropriate like when you’re blog post is showing an outdoor wedding at a Boston golf course.

We will publish more tips in Part 2—tips that focus on how to get quality links. We will also give you some pointers on how to make your website more SEO-friendly and how a blog can help you get on top of the game. Stay tuned!