Kamis, 03 Oktober 2013
Photographers who think their Web sites are simply online versions of their print portfolios aren"t taking advantage of the way people use the internet to find information, and look for products and services they want, says Allen Murabayashi of PhotoShelter. The co-founder of the Web site design and hosting service offered tips for making your site a more effective marketing tool during his video tutorial, "Your Web Site is Killing Your Business," at the PDN Virtual Trade Show, "Focus on Wedding and Portrait Photography," on May 25. Murabayashi said that search engine optimization (SEO) does not mean just making sure your name pops up in Google. "The goal of search engine optimization is unsolicited web traffic from people looking for goods and services you can supply." He ran through the factors that influence how Google ranks sites, and that can determine whether or not your site appears on page one of a search. The most important factors are external links to your site, and on-page factors, including titles and other text.Getting trusted sites to link back to your site is difficult; it comes down to creating "compelling content" that other people want to link to or show. The good news, he said, is that you can control the on-page factors. By editing your page titles, captions and alt tags, you can improve your SEO today, he said. He noted that on many photographers" sites, the URL that appears in the browser is the same from page to page, typically the photographer"s name or the name of the site. This is a problem he said, because "Google hates repetition." He noted that the About page, Home page, Gallery pages and other pages should all should have different titles, preferably geared towards the search terms your potential customers would use to search for you or your competitors. Those titles appear at the top of your web pages, so Google gives them more weight than text further down the page. When Google lists your page, it will only show 70 characters in the title, and 140 characters in the page description. Murabayashi recommends photographers think of the description of each of their web pages as "advertising for your site." What words should you have on your site? He suggested coming up with a "search term hit list": the 10 search terms you would like to dominate. You can then make sure you use all these phrases, in the same word order, in your captions, page names, descriptive text and links to gallery pages (rather than just sprinkling some loose words on the page). To come up with a list, he suggested checking the "adwords" diagnostic tool on www.adwords.google.com to look for the most commonsearches that potential customers in your targeted demographic would use. "Shoots photojournalistic weddings in Chicago" might be a less commonly used phrase than "Chicago weddings photojournalism" for example. (He noted that "shoots" is a term few non-photographers use.) Murabayashi also offered tips on using social media, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as a way to increase the "online footprint" of your brand. "There"s no way a single domain will come up in all ten spots" on the first page of a Google search, so by increasing your presence on the Web, you increase the number of times your brand will appear in search results. To illustrate, he typed the brand name "PhotoShelter" into Google; the first page of the search showed not only the home page of PhotoShelter"s site, but its blog, its Twitter account, its Facebook page and its Vimeo account. He recommended that if you have two different businesses, such as a stock business and a wedding photography business, you create two domain names; Google will search both URLs. "So it increases your chances of being seen, in my opinion.""The goal of social media for business is not mindless interaction," he said. "It"s a conduit to your web site." Rather than posting what you had for lunch on Twitter or Facebook, he said, you should provide links back to your web site. Blogs are also easy to update frequently with new images and useful, contextual captions and titles. "Your blog is not an online journal. It"s an SEO machine: you pick the topics, the key words, and create back links back to your web site. Every time you create a new gallery of images, you blog about that and it"s beneficial for your SEO." During the web chat that followed the webinar, he noted, "The angle I'm advocating is that even if no one is reading your blog, the search engines are, and they can bring you unsolicited traffic. "Finally, he discussed "conversion," the process of getting a visitor to your web page to take action. Murabayashi, whose company, PhotoShelter, creates e-commerce-enabled web sites for photographers, mentioned that photographers may want to get visitors to buy a print on their sites. But there are other examples of conversion, he said: You may want visitors to sign up for your newsletter or Twitter feed, or get email updates about your new work.During the Web chat that followed his webinar, several photographers asked about Flash sites, which are not optimized for SEO. Murabayashi said that if your viewers are coming to your sites simply expecting to look at your work, "Flash sites might be appropriate." However, Flash sites have other problems, he noted, including a lack of page names. For example, Flash sites are harder to update, and Google"s spiders are checking to see whether or not a site has been updated within the last few months. He recommended that photographers with Flash sites use their blogs to create news and new links. "Your Web Site Is Killing Your Business" and other free video tutorials offered at PDN"s virtual trade show are archived. They can be seen in the "auditorium" of the site. To register, click here: PDNs Virtual Trade Show "Focus on Wedding and Portrait Photography."
