Dameian Lott

SEO Permalinks : What You Need To Know

Dameian — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:53:54 +0000

When I get an email from a photographer asking for SEO help, the first thing I do is go give their site a quick SEO inspection. One of the first things I look for during that inspection is the presence of search optimized permalinks. If your permalinks aren’t at least moderately optimized, you’re losing both potential ranking power and visitors from Google.

In this post: I hope to explain what permalinks actually are, how they can benefit you, and I do my best to help you understand the pros and cons of different permalink structures. Probably in waaaay too much detail. I’d rather give you more information so you can make better choices than not give enough and leave you hanging.

It’s a lot to read, but given (a) how often I see photographers use less-than-optimized permalinks and (b) the positive benefits of SEO optimized permalinks it just might be worth the time. As an extra bonus I channel Google’s own Matt Cutts – a guy who knows a thing or two about how Google works and has had a lot to say on this particular subject.

What Is a Permalink?

The term permalink is short for “permanent link”. In English, permalinks are what appears in your browser’s location bar when you visit any given post or page on the web. It is your post/page’s unique location on the web. Your permalink structure defines what information about your post appears in its link. Here’s the Wikipedia permalink to, well, its own “Permalink” page:

How Your Permalinks Can Help Your SEO

Most SEO experts agree that permalinks containing keywords in them can help you rank better. That is, of course, one reason you’d want to optimize them. There is some debate over just how much of an actual ranking factor keyword rich permalinks are though. Many SEO experts say they are a pretty important while others say they have minimal effect. I think it’s important to have SEO permalinks even if they have no effect on your rankings at all. Why? For people.

Why Optimize Permalinks for People

Google has made it so your permalinks are an integral part of a search engine user’s decision making process. Permalinks appear as part of your search snippet on Google’s search results pages along with your page title and a description (usually taken from your page’s meta description):

As seen in the example above, permalinks are one of only three crucial bits of information Google gives searchers about your page. That makes them pretty important, and why they should be optimized to appeal to people.

SEO permalinks are an indicator to searchers that your page has the information they’re searching for. They can help increase clickthroughs since they give searchers a reason to choose your link over a competitors. Conversely, under-optimized permalinks can lead to missed traffic since they give the surfer no additional clues as to what may be on the page. That’s what makes your permalinks important SEO marketing tools, and why it is a good idea to optimize them.

All else being equal, which of the above would you be more likely to click? I don’t know about you, but I’d click the one with a keyword rich permalink that gives me the scent of information that I’m searching for.

Site Performance vs. SEO

Generally speaking, permalinks that are considered better for SEO tend to cause slightly slower page load times. Computers (and by extension software like WordPress) can crunch numbers significantly faster than they can make sense of human friendly text. Permalinks that start with numbers (generally dates or post IDs) can be processed very quickly, so they’ll load faster. Permalinks that are better for SEO are loaded up with keywords instead of numbers, therefore they can have a negative effect on site speed. You have to make a decision between how fast your pages load and how SEO friendly your permalinks are. You can’t perfectly optimize for both SEO and performance because they are mutually exclusive in this case.

My advice? Don’t worry about it. The performance impact is measured in mere milliseconds, isn’t enough to cause concern in most cases (unless you’re on a cheap hosting plan), and SEO benefits like more ranking power and better clickthrough rates far outweigh the slight performance hit.

Choosing an SEO Optimized Permalink Structure

Here are the most commonly used and recommended SEO permalink configurations along with my pros, cons, and thoughts on each.

Option 1: The Default

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=458

Main Pros:

Your posts will load just about as fast as they can.

Main Cons:

Pretty much the antithesis of SEO friendly. They offer no potential ranking boost and provide no benefit to searchers trying to glean information about your post in your SERP snippet.

My Thoughts: Don’t do it. I see a lot of photographers use this structure simply because it is the WordPress default. This is what actually prompted me to write this post. If your links currently look like this, I’d recommend changing your permalinks to something more search friendly before your site gets any bigger and the complications/challenges involved with changing them begin to swell.

Option 2: Organized by Date

http://www.yoursite.com/2009/04/28/asheville-wedding-photography-debbie-martin/

WordPress Structure: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/ (or similar)

Main Pros:

It can make your posts load a few milliseconds faster compared to the more SEO friendly options below. That’s all I got. I can’t think of a single other legitimate reason why it makes sense to use this permalink format if you’re looking to maximize the SEO benefit of your permalinks. If you have a reason, leave it in the comments. I’d love to hear your reasoning.

Main Cons:

You automatically date your posts in the search engine results. People generally visit pages they perceive as having fresher content, you will almost certainly lose potential clickthoughs down the road with this permalink format.
You face the same five keyword limit as you do with the /%postname%/ permalink structure. I expound on this below with a special guest appearance (well, sort of) by Google’s own Matt Cutts.

My thoughts: A decent compromise between site performance and SEO, but it has its drawbacks. There are far better options for SEO.

Option 3: The Post Headline/Slug

http://www.yoursite.com/asheville-wedding-photography-venue-name-debbie-martin/

WordPress Structure: /%postname%/

Main Pros:

I can say without a doubt that this is the format I’ve seen most SEO experts recommend.
You have a lot of control over the keyword usage in the permalink on a post-by-post basis.
Some SEO experts claim that having your keywords as close to the domain name as possible helps. I am not sure how much this really helps for ranking. It is more important for people to see keywords close to the domain than it is for ranking, since it can lead to more clickthroughs from SERPs.

Mr. Cutts, what say you?

Too many keywords in the URL “just looks spammy” is the take home lesson from this video.

Main Cons:

Keyword strategy becomes more important on a post-by-post basis, and you have to give a lot of thought to each post’s headline to make sure they are well optimized.
You’re limited to the number of words you can use, and there are only so many ways you can say “ Wedding Photographer”. As such, you will eventually face post naming conflicts.
Likewise, this permalink structure will probably present problems for sites with a more specific focus and/or will eventually have hundreds or thousands of posts over the years.
Many SEO experts that I trust the opinions of contend that page headlines/titles that go beyond 5 words carry less ranking power than those that stay under five words. An assertion backed up by Matt Cutts, who stated the following in an interview with Stephan Spencer a few years ago:

“If you can make your title four or five words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

My thoughts: If you want to follow the advice of the majority of SEO experts, this is probably the way to go. I think for sites that cover more general subject matter or small sites that will only ever have a few posts it can work well. I’m not convinced this is the best way to go for photographers though. Photographers are avid and active bloggers. They tend to have hundreds (if not thousands) of posts, and those posts generally revolve around a handful of topics. That means you’re eventually going to run into naming conflicts unless you ignore Matt Cutt’s advice and use longer page titles. Then you risk having your permalink keywords devalued. Why do that to yourself if it can be avoided? I’d rather follow Matt Cutts’ advice, keep my page headlines under five words, and get the full ranking power of my permalink’s keywords. The good news is we can have it both ways…

Option 4: Category and Post Headline/Slug

http://www.yoursite.com/asheville-wedding-photography/debbie-martin-venue-name-wedding/

WordPress Structure: /%category%/%postname%/

Main Pros:

If your photography business focuses on several specialties, this structure can help you ensure that your most important keywords appear first in your permalinks every time.
This structure looks nice and organized to both Google and searchers.
It takes pressure off you when deciding on your post headlines since you know your keywords will already be present in your permalinks. It also makes it easier to keep your post headlines under five words since you know you’re keywords will already be included in your permalink. That means your keywords always carry their full ranking power.

It’s Matt Cutts approved:

Main Cons:

Unfortunately, WordPress decides the category, not you. You should be fine if you list a post under just one category. You could end up with a few permalinks that are actually unoptimized if you tend to list posts in multiple categories or forget to set a category altogether. This can of course be retroactively fixed, but it will take time and careful use of 301 redirects.
Some SEOs claim that having post appear to be a few directory levels deep can cause it to lose ranking power. Personally I’ve seen no real evidence of this, and our new friend Matt seems to back this up in the following video. On-site link/navigation structure seems to be far more important than perceived depth in the permalink.

My thoughts: I think using the /%category%/%postname%/ is both a safe and smart bet. The key here would be naming your categories so that they include targeted keyword phrases that people are actually searching for. For example, a category names like “Wedding Photography”, “Wedding Photographers”, or even a longer but geographically relevent category name like “Asheville Wedding Photographer” would be better than just “Weddings”. In fact, the geographically oriented category name would probably be your most optimized option here.

Option 5: Post ID and Post Name

http://www.yoursite.com/342/asheville-wedding-venue-name-debbie-martin/

WordPress Structure: /%post_id%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%-%postname%/

Main Pros:

This is a good compromise between performance and SEO. It gives you faster page load times while not dating your posts.

Main Cons:

See the cons under Option 3 above. They all apply here. Relying solely on the post headline for your keywords can be problematic and even frustrating.

My thoughts: This is a decent compromise between site performance and SEO.

There you have it. Five permalink structures to choose from that range from the most performance friendly to those that are more search friendly. You’re going to have to decide which one you think works best for you. My advice is to really give this some thought because it can be problematic to switch later (as you’ll learn later in this post).

And the winner is…

Each has benefits. It is a matter of weighing those benefits against each other. I’d say /%category%/%postname%/ might be the easiest for most people writing blog posts to work with. This configuration ensures you always have your main keywords in your SEO permalink, it avoids some of the pitfalls of using just /%postname%/, and you don’t have to stress so much when writing your post title since you know your main keywords will already be present in your permalink. If you decide to use /%category%/%postname%/, you just have to be mindful of keyword strategy when you set up your categories and be careful to only list posts in one category each.

Once you decide on your permalink structure, it’s time to set it up.

Setting Up Your Permalink Structure

WordPress makes it extremely easy to set up or change your permalink structure. Before we get into setting up permalinks in WordPress, a word of caution:

Do not run off and change your permalinks now if your site is established and/or you’re already ranking well in the search engines. You could end up creating 404 file not found errors, sending visitors into a black hole, or hurt your rankings.

Before you change your permalinks on an established site, please read the “The Dangers of Changing Permalinks on an Established Site” section below. You may even want to consider hiring someone who will ensure that the risked are minimized and the SEO benefits are maximized.

If your site is brand new, only has a few posts, and you aren’t yet ranking well in the search engines, you can change your permalinks now without much fear of possible negative side effects. Here’s how:

Step 1: In the WordPress left sidebar, expand the Settings” menu, then click the “Permalinks” menu item under it. Like this:

Step 2: You’ll be presented with a page that lets you select one of the pre-defined permalink structures in WordPress or make a custom permalink structure of your own. If you want tt customoze your WordPress permalinks, just follow these instructions:

You’re done! You’ll now have permalinks that are optimized for both Google and searchers.

If your site is established or already ranking well in the search engines, you’ll want to keep reading…

The Dangers of Changing Permalinks on an Established Site

Despite how easy they make it to change permalinks in the admin, you’re toying with complex stuff that can have a dramatic impact on your site if you’re not careful. WordPress has gotten smarter about this over the years and in many cases you won’t have any problems. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t proceed with boatloads of caution if you plan on changing your permalinks yourself. A quick Google search on something like “changing permalinks wordpress 3.1″ will show you how problematic changing permalinks can be, even on the latest version of WordPress. There used to be a great plugin called “Advanced Permalinks” that let you set new posts to a new permalink structure while preserving your old permalinks. Sadly that plugin is no longer any help since it has been reported to be incompatible with newer versions of WordPress and has been abandoned by its author. My advice would be to save yourself a lot of potential grief and hire a trustworthy and reputable web person to do this for you.

If you decide to DIY your permalink change, you’ll want to ensure your posts forward to their new locations properly (via Apache 301 redirects) and check that no plugins you may be running interfere with your permalink changes. The Redirection Plugin may be a helpful in tracking down any resulting 404s (file not found) errors that may occur after you make the changes.

A few side effects to note no matter what:

If your pages show the number of Facebook Likes, Twitter Retweets or other social media numbers, odds are they’ll be reset since those numbers are generally assigned based on your page’s distinct permalink.
Certain WordPress plugins are known to conflict with permalink changes. If you run any plugins that deal with caching, categories, or tags you may have to do some extra work to get everything working correctly again.

Even though changing your permalinks to something more Google and people friendly comes with its challenges, the long term benefits are well worth it. Better rankings and higher clickthrough rates mean more clients in your portfolio!

Photographers! Is your site on this list? You’re server may have been hacked.

Dameian — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:55:15 +0000

Update: Good news! BluDomain has seemingly fixed the hack. Woot! The saga is not over yet though…

Important, Please read:

As a colleague of mine just pointed out, everyone hosted on the infected BluDomain server (75.125.226.202) should probably contact Google and let them know this was taken care of to protect their sites from being wrongfully labeled as an attack site.

How do you know if you were on the infected server?

First, do not rely on the list below. There is a chance it is not complete.

Type your domain name into a browser’s address/location bar, then paste this exactly as it is after the domain name:

/~made/bluadmin/styles/log/login

In your browser location/address bar it should look like this (using my site as an example):

http://dameian.com/~made/bluadmin/styles/log/login

Hit Enter/Return to go to the page. You will get a message telling you your site leads to a “Web Forgery” or is a “Reported Attack Site” or something similar if you’re on the infected server.

If you do see such a message, you should definitely contact Google immediately and tell them your site has been fixed!

3:00 PM Update: BluDomain says they’ve resolved the issue. I have to give them credit. Three and a half hours is a reasonable response time for finding, isolating, and fixing a server exploit.

BluDomain’s email to me is as follows:

“Dameian,

The issue has been resolved.

Please request that the
warning be removed by visiting

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?tpl=emailer

and reporting an “incorrect forgery alert.” Google will review this
request and take the appropriate actions.

let us know if you need further assistance.”

Update! Just checked my spam inbox and found a reply from BluDomain regarding the support ticket I submitted. It was date stamped 11:42 this morning. They are aware of the problem and seem to be responding to it. It should also be noted that they replied to my email in about 10 minutes. Thumbs up so far! Their reply email reads as follows…

“Hello,

I will check on what could be the problem with our hosting administrators. I will send you a response as soon as I hear back from them. Very sorry for the inconvenience. We will do our very best to rectify this problem as soon as humanly possible.

Best regards,
Bludomain Support Team”

Sites showing evidence of being effected. This is NOT a definitive list! Please follow the directions above to see if you were/are effected by this.

9twentyfive.com

aaronbeckphoto.com

akaciaphoto.com

alisonschwamkrug.com

amayaphotography.com

amykellyphotography.com

amywilliamsphotography.net

andrewluckettjr.com

andrewreddstudios.com

andshetookthispicture.com

anewoutlookphotography.com

aprylmurphyphotography.com

architec360.com

ashleyesterle.com

bdayportraits.com

blazicphotos.com

blog.erinlphoto.com

bluewindowimages.com

bonnieclinton.com

brandonosmondphotography.com

bridgetcranephoto.com

brockkrytonphotography.com

butterflyeventsonline.com

caryjobephotography.com

catthisius.com

ceramicraft.com

chapoteauphoto.com

charitysampsonphotography.com

charmainescarlettphotography.com

cjshelker.com

corriecostonphoto.com

cynphoto.com

davidrackleyphotography.com

deanamichiephotography.com

deannawattersimages.com

delightfuloccasion.com

designsbytonyar.com

devinbruce.com

dolcehomechico.com

efaucets.com

elisehannaphotography.com

ericamowellphotography.com

erinhphotography.com

erinkeownphotography.com

erinlphoto.com

exposurephotographicstudio.com

fioreinteriors.com

florabyfauna.com

flowersbygideon.com

flyingdreampost.com

freddieochoaphotography.com

gabrielmuro.com

gailmakiwilson.com

gametimeactionphotos.com

globalphotography.net

goldenviewphotography.com

gorjusphotography.com

groovesofhouston.com

handdphoto.com

heritageportraits.org

holliannstudios.com

hopeclairphotography.com

hungryfarmerbbq.com

imagesbyotilia.com

imaginationphotography.org

imemoryfilms.com

internationalhairways.com

isaacmarcs.com

jallanphotography.com

jamielynnecreative.com

jaylenebarbir.com

jenleebeephotography.com

jevoisphotography.com

jlwatkinsphotos.com

journeyintimephotography.com

jrichmondphotography.com

juliepinedo.com

karenmassier.com

kaseandalliphotography.com

kevinbeem.com

kevincraiglow.com

kimtasha.com

kookerphoto.com

krisjonesart.com

kruegertunedracing.com

lancasterpaintingcompany.com

leeboswellphotography.com

leisaphoto.com

lindsayviguephotography.com

littlemomentsfotography.com

lonjina.com

mandysmithphotography.com

manuelriosphotography.com

marcberryphotography.com

melissagrayphoto.com

mhornphoto.com

middlechildphotography.com

mindyleigh.com

missmonetphotography.com

naomimeyer.com

nathalietodd.com

nessakphotography.com

nicoleeversonphotography.com

photographybyelly.com

photographybykellee.com

portraitsbyjl.net

precisionimagesphotography.com

puresugarphotography.net

quinciescreations.com

ramonweddings.com

reamsphoto.com

rebeccaarthurs.com

retailfixture.com

rosannsphotography.com

rtwophotography.com

ryancookphotography.com

s67photography.com

sarahdianephotography.com

scottriess.com

seraphimgraphics.com

severncapture.com

shillingfordphotography.com

shutterartistry.com

snugglebugsphotography.com

stephanierey.com

stillscapesphotographystudio.com

tabithaboyd.com

tarakuhlow.com

tegrastonenuess.com

thatgirlphotography.com

thenagainphotography.com

theweddingphotopros.com

thrubeckyslens.com

tomwickyphotography.com

tracyclarkphotography.com

vaughnjennings.com

victorsaidov.com

viniferafloraldesign.com

violetsevents.com

waggintailsretreat.com

waldmanphotography.com

www.aaronbeckphoto.com

www.annamolletphotography.com

www.annecamillephotography.com

www.auradayspas.com

www.blogmeright.com

www.bluesideupphoto.com

www.bluewatercustom.com

www.bpevents.ca

www.brianbastinelli.com

www.christiephilips.com

www.cirklproductions.com

www.clarafrench.com

www.craiglow.com

www.darraghswitzerphotography.ca

www.emilyfuselierphotography.com

www.eventsbyjamie.com

www.everandafterphotography.com

www.freshimages.ca

www.globalphotography.net

www.grunewald.ca

www.hansenfineportraits.com

www.heatherhartphoto.net

www.hogewoodhouse.com

www.imaginationphotography.org

www.jennyspringerphotography.com

www.joseirun.com

www.josephkbrownphotography.com

www.katymaehl.com

www.lifestyleportraits.biz

www.mandjphotography.com

www.martinhaseman.com

www.mindysuephotography.com

www.nberyphoto.com

www.nessakphotography.com

www.nicolehackerphotography.com

www.paylesspatiocovers.ca

www.photographybymeyer.com

www.photoswithbluebird.com

www.reamsphoto.com

www.rebeccahollisphotography.com

www.retailfixture.com

www.studiofour13.com

www.tarakuhlow.com

www.theweddingphotopros.com

www.thuffmanphotography.com

www.twistedforkbistro.ca

www.twopairblog.com

www.twopairphotography.com

www.victorsaidov.com

If you determine you’ve been effected, contact Google immediately and make sure they know it’s been fixed and you’re NOT an attack site. Protect your site’s reputation!

Wedding Photographers SEO : Optimizing Images

Dameian — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:03:20 +0000

So you’ve just shot an amazing wedding. You have tons of gorgeous pictures of the bride, the groom, their families, the venue, the church, some of the vendors’ handy work, and practically everything else picture-worthy that happened to wander in view of your keen eye and expensive equipment. Those photos are going to make your clients very happy. If you follow the strategy I outline in this post, they’re also going to make Google very happy and become your SEO secret weapon. If properly used as part of an overall SEO strategy, your photos are powerful marketing tools that could help you to outrank your competitors and lead you to new clients.

In this post, you’ll learn how to:

Avoid a few costly SEO mistakes made by many wedding photographers.
Formulate a results-oriented keyword strategy for blog posts.
Optimize the images in your blog posts to attract new business.

Plus I’ll show you actual proof that this method works and explain the SEO strategy behind it.

Bringing out the inner beauty of your pictures

Your clients adore your photos. Your blog vistors swoon over them. Google loves them. Yep, you read that right: Google loves your images. Or, at least, it WANTS to love them. The problem is most photographers fail to show off the inner beauty of their pictures and therefore miss out on their SEO benefits. I’m going to help you show off the inner beauty of your images. They have something hidden inside that (a) Google just can’t resist and (b) many photographers tend to neglect even when they do use it. It’s called “alternate text”.

What is “alternate text”?

An image’s “alternate text” is a bit of text embedded in the image’s actual html tag. The alternate text is read by Google to get an idea of what the image is all about. It is specified by the abbreviation “alt” (from here on I’ll refer to it as “alt”). It is one of several attributes found inside of an image tag, and it’s the most important image attribute for SEO. Research indicates that Google assigns extra ranking power to the text found in an image’s alt attribute and my own experiments back this up.

Let’s take a look at the attributes of an html image tag. Click to see it full size:

As shown in the example image above, there are three parts to the image tag that should be optimized when posting pictures. The most important is the alternate text (alt) of course, but we should optimize the source file name (src), and the title (title) while we’re at it. Doing so can lead to more Google traffic, make your images more friendly to users, and keep us in line with best practices. Now that you know what we’re going to be optimizing, It’s time to learn why and how.

Step 1: Develop a keyword and content strategy

SEO tends to be a holistic discipline. The sum of the whole is truly greater than the individual parts. This means you should to be thinking about SEO every step of the way, and that smart SEO strategy begins well before you even post anything to your site. There are lots of things to think about and do first. One of the most important among these is to develop an overall content and keyword strategy to govern your blog. Then, for each post, you should formulate an individual keyword strategy that (a) fits within your overall strategy and (b) is designed to leverage the content of your post to attract new visitors and clients.

Both content strategy and keyword strategy are monumental topics that go well beyond the scope of this post. I cover both of these topics to varying degrees with my consulting clients. I’m going to uncomplicate things quite a bit for the sake of this post and use a simplified version of the keyword strategy I recently used on a post I optimized for my fiance, Asheville Wedding Photographer Ashley Gillett.

But first, a couple of reality checks are in order…

One of the most costly SEO mistakes I see photographers make is applying a keyword strategy that targets very broad keyword terms on every single post/page (such as “Asheville Wedding Photographer” in Ashley’s case). This leads to particularly nasty habits like keyword stuffing and over-optimization on each blog post. Google can and does penalize people when they overuse keywords in posts, stuff title tags full of them, and repeat the same keywords over and over. Why? Simple. It looks like spam (because, technically, it is). This practice has been observed to dilute the ranking power of any individual post/page because you’ve confused Google. They don’t know which page is most important for any given keyword, so instead of having one page rank on page one in Google’s SERPs, you’ll have a few pages rank around 50th or so. Trust me on this… you’d rather have several well optimized pages that each target specific keywords rank on the first page! Broad keyword targeting is a rampant, caustic practice among photographers and I have no doubt that it causes many to lose rankings. I’ve seen it over and over again.
The vast majority of the search results Google returns for broad keyword terms like “Asheville Wedding Photographer” will usually be to a photographer’s main homepage or main blog page. This is because those pages tend to collect more backlinks and therefore have significantly higher ranking power. Be mindful of your global keyword strategy and include your main target term in your posts where appropriate, just be sure to not make your main target term keyword focus of every single post. It will be near impossible for any single blog post to rank in the top 20 or so search results for such broad keyword terms unless it gets considerable media coverage or is heavily linked to for some reason. Trying to get single blog posts to rank high for broad terms wastes the actual ranking potential of that post.

Okay, but what do these two reality checks have to do with our image alt text?

In short: Everything. They clearly demonstrate why it is both fruitless and counterproductive to only target broad terms with your individual blog posts, and they make the case for deploying a narrow keyword strategy instead. If you optimize your blog posts (and by extension, your image alt text) to target strategic keywords unique to that particular post, you’ll improve your chances of avoiding any ranking penalties *and* you’ll actually bring in new business! No matter how you look at it, that’s a win.

Now we know we need to minimize the use of overly-broad keyword terms in our blog post and focus on more targeted terms. To get an idea of how we do that, let’s take a look at the details of our example wedding blog post:

This wedding at Byron’s South End in Charlotte, NC is our example post.
The bride and groom’s names were Jori and Josh, respectively.
The bride and groom are Jewish.
The wedding and reception were held at a venue called Byron’s.
Byron’s is located in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood.

This simple list of details about our wedding gives us a solid start on what should become our blog post’s targeted keyword strategy. These details only loosely describe the wedding, but (and this is a very big but…the kind that would even make Sir-Mix-A-Lot take notice) they contain terms that potential clients may be searching for and they are relevant to our pictures. How do we spin these small threads of information into SEO gold?

Enter our hero, the image alt text!

For photographers, the alt text of your images presents a perfect opportunity to go after long tail keyword terms. Your images tell a story to your visitors. The alt text of those images allows you to tell a story to Google. As previously stated, Google seems to give alt text even more ranking power than the standard text in your post. Our keyword strategy revolves around telling the right story to Google for individual blog posts. You can get better rankings if you do it correctly. The best part? It’s pretty easy to do. Here’s the secret formula:

Venues, vendors, locations, and subjects + image alt text = SEO win.

People getting married will search for vendors and venues they hope to use, and they’re going to want to see pictures. As a photographer, you are in a unique position to show them pictures of venues, products, or services from weddings you have shot. You’ve also just associated yourself with that venue/vendor in their minds and put your name on the list of potential wedding photographers in the process. No matter how you look at it, that’s good marketing. This is our individual blog post keyword strategy in a nutshell.

Step 2: Do your homework

Now that we’ve come up with our basic keyword strategy, it’s time to fine tune it for this particular post. In our example case, I researched the vendors and venues involved with the wedding using tools like the Google keyword suggestion tool to find out which ones get searched for most. A good approach would be to focus most of your targeting on one venue or vendor, letting the others take the role of supporting cast to attract auxiliary search results. In this case I chose to target the name of the reception hall: “Byron’s South End”. I chose this term over the caterer (which actually gets MORE searches in Google) for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

So our main target keyword phrase is: “Byron’s South End“.

Once I established this, I began to research a few related and auxiliary phrases to target. These are basically phrases that people would be searching for when doing wedding research related to the wedding images Ashley posted. They also include common mistypes of the main keyword phrase (“Byrons Southend”, for example). Here’s a few I came up with:

Byrons Southend: Targeting a common mistype of the venue.
Byrons South End Wedding: Targeting the venue and the activity.
Charlotte South End Wedding: Targeting the popular neighborhood.
Jori and Josh Wedding: Targeting the couple.
Jewish Wedding Charlotte: Keyword tools report very little search for this, but Ashley HAS seen traffic from it!

These are all terms people will be searching for and that could lead to future clients for Ashley. It also gives us a few auxiliary terms that help give context to our main keyword phrase. Now that we’ve done our homework and have our main target phrases, let’s get to work!

Step 3: Applying our new strategy to get real-world results

Assumptions: We’re going to start getting technical here, so from here on out I have to make some assumptions to keep this post relevant. They are:

You have a self-hosted WordPress blog.
You know how to upload images to blog posts in WordPress.
You know “F-Stop” isn’t slang for the “Fast-Stop” convenience store chain.

Naming your images

We have some SEO and optimization tasks to do before we even put our images online. The most important of these tasks is to give our images keyword rich names. Among other benefits, this is great way to attract visitors from Google’s image search.

Note: I actually skipped this part when I optimized Ashley’s post because it was an existing post already online. If it were a new post, or if I were doing this for a client, I would have definitely taken the time to properly optimize each image name.

There are a couple of approaches you can take when optimizing image names. You can decide on a standard keyword name for all your images then just add a sequential number to them or you can go crazy and name each individual image a unique, keyword rich name. For the sake of brevity, I’m only going to give an example of the former.

Since our main target keyword is “Byron’s South End”, the photos are of a wedding, and we want to reach people searching for both, it only makes sense that we name the images something like:

byrons-south-end-wedding-01.jpg
byrons-south-end-wedding-02.jpg
byrons-south-end-wedding-03.jpg
etc…

Important: To be safe, only use hyphens to separate your keywords and stick with plain alphabetical characters in your words. Steer clear of spaces, underscores, and other special characters.

A note about image compression: Web browsers limit the number of concurrent page elements they download. More importantly, Google now counts slow page load times against you. This means it is now more important than ever to properly compress your images before putting them online. In Photoshop’s “Save for Web” feature, a JPEG compression setting of 60-70 usually offers great compression with little to no noticeable quality loss. There other optimization guidelines you should consider employing, but this is a good start.

Now that we have properly compressed images with keyword optimized names, it’s time to get them into our post.

The grand finale

As stated, this post assumes that you are familiar with how to upload images to your blog posts. One you get them uploaded, you should see something that looks like this:

You’ll want to repeat the following steps for each image. Be sure to save your changes after each image! You don’t want to lose all the hard work you’ve done.

(1) View the image details.

Click the “Show” link next to the first image as shown below.

(2) Give the image keyword rich alternate text.

Now we’ll actually get to the business of assigning our alternate text (finally, right?) and title. Here’s how to do that:

A few tips on assigning your alt text:

Don’t repeat the same keyword phrase over and over again. Give each image unique alt text, varying them from the pool of keywords you came up with before posting.
Put your keywords as close to the beginning of the alt text as possible.
Don’t stuff your alt text full of keywords! Limit yourself to ONE keyword phrase per image, and try to limit the number of overall words used to about one sentence. If it’s too big for Twitter, it’s definitely too big for your alt text.
Use alt text that is relevant to the image while still targeting your keywords. Example: If the picture is of the bride and goom dancing, the alt text I’d use would be something like “Byron’s South End: Bride and groom dancing.”
Don’t force it. The average wedding blog post has 20+ images. You don’t need to use the keyword phrases you’re targeting in every single one (nor should you). Other words to use in your alt text are the names of participants by title (Mother of the Bride, Groomsmen, etc.), geographic locations (don’t forget to mention your city and state!), and activities (cutting the wedding cake, saying vows, etc.) All of these are great for image alt text because they (a) actually describe the images and (b) bolster the overall relevance of the targeted keywords in your post.
Bonus tip: Of your images for any given wedding, pick out a “Signature Shot” that best sums up your photography style. Assign this image an alt tag that represents your site-wide keyword strategy. For example: In Ashley Gillett’s case, she’d assign the alt text “Asheville Wedding Photographer” to her one signature shot in each post.

A few things to note about the title attribute:

The title attribute is usually what your visitors will see when they hover their mouse over your images, so make it visitor friendly.
The title attribute is believed to hold little to no SEO power.
One way to approach the title tag is look at it as you would a title plaque that hangs next to a piece of art in a museum. While the alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image, the title attribute can be used to give it a name.

(3) Insert your images into your post.

There are different ways to do this, and they vary depending on the WordPress theme you use. For Ashley, I programmed a WordPress function that automagically inserts her images into her posts. All she has to do is set her alt and title and she’s done. Many photographers use the ProPhoto3 theme, which comes with an “insert all” feature that is handy. Since I can’t account for every possible image insertion scenario, I’ll just say insert your images like you do now. The alt text should be inserted along with them thanks to WordPress.

You’re done! You now (hopefully) have SEO optimized, keyword targeted images working to attract new clients for you.

Getting results

I’m a results oriented guy, and this post wouldn’t be complete without showing you some real-world results. The impact was substantial and almost immediate. Ashley went from having no significant rankings for this post to having at least ten front page rankings related to her targeted keywords within 24 hours. She is now enjoying an increase in high quality targeted traffic! Here are just a few examples of her targeted rankings:

Wrapping up

This should only be considered one of many SEO tools you take advantage of as a professional photographer. A solid SEO strategy extends well beyond image optimization and encompasses all aspects of your site from your source code to how you link from document to document. It all matters. Image optimization is, however, a practical and extremely valuable place for photographers to start. I hope you take the time to implement these tips and make them a part of your SEO strategy. Happy ranking!