10 Tips To Improve SEO For Your Business: Part 1
October 24th, 2018
Tip #1: Beckon Google
While flirting with disaster can ruin your day, flirting with Google can increase your search ranking. OK, flirting may not be accurate but you can at least beckon Google to come and index your website. This means that the first thing on your SEO journey should be to register with Google webmasters. This calls out to Google and Bing by saying, “Come index my website!” You can register your website by going to webmaster.google.com and submitting a sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing.
Tip #2: Go Back To Basics
Add a display name, welcome message and a website description to your website. Remember to include information about the who, what and where of your business. While the who what and where of your business may be obvious to any human looking at your site, it’s important to remember that Google needs text and copy to index.
Tip #3: Location, Location, Location
Add relevant text to your website pages such as “San Francisco Bay Area wedding photographer” as opposed to generic text such as “photos, photography, photographer” to help your target market find you. That kind of location-based detail is powerful because search engines can geographically contextualize search results by matching your location-based text with the searcher’s browser location.
Tip #4: Text Separate From Images
Often I’ll see amazing photographers using photos with text overlaid on the image to convey their website messaging. While it may look good, it is not doing them any favors when it comes to SEO. When text is added to an image in Photoshop and saved together as a JPEG or PNG, the text layer is flattened into the image and is not longer indexable. So when Google crawls your page, it sees only an image made of ones and zeros, no text. Although doesn’t directly impact SEO, it’s worth mentioning that an image may render and crop differently on a mobile device. That may be fine for the image but can distort any text that was added and look unprofessional. The moral of the story is to be sure to use actual text on your site rather than text embedded in an uploaded image.
Tip #5, Keywords Are Bottom Of The Heap
Using keywords as an SEO strategy used to be the bee’s knees, but that strategy is now as old as the phrase, “Bee’s knees”. As the proliferation of imagery on the web grows at an exponential rate, Google’s task of identifying, qualifying and rating website content grows exponentially in difficulty as well. Thus, Google now uses much more than keywords in rating and qualifying search results. Here is my list of how google prioritizes certain content: (1)Title, header, H1 tag, (2) caption or description, (3)filename, (4) links, and finally, (5) keywords. Keywords, which used to be so important, are now prioritized behind other SEO opportunities. Consider this list when deciding what to spend your SEO development time on.
About The Author
Evan Chung is a San Francisco Bay Area wedding photographer and an expert on website SEO/branding and small business marketing. He is also a former Zenfolio Zenmaster and now a part of the Zenfolio Ambassador Team. His beautiful and engaging imagery showcases his love for people and capturing emotions on camera while his photography seminars and workshops display his passion for website excellence. It is easy to see his dedication to his craft and his desire to reinvest back into the photography community.
Check out his work at www.evanchungphoto.com and follow him on Instagram and Facebook.
