Wedding Photographers SEO : Optimizing Images

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…

1. 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.
2. 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!