What is SEO and what does the term have to do with a photographer and his photography website?

  Basically seo stands for search engine optimization or how do you get your site ranked in the top five on a google search.  If you go to a local book store or google seo on the internet you will find thousands of people looking to sell you some plan that will get your search rankings in the top five on page one. 

   If you decide to create a website, seo is something you have to pay attention to. The software company that sold me the software to create my website considers this important enough to put in a page analysis calculator which tells me what I need to do to improve each page's seo.  All though I am not an expert on seo, common sense tells me that if I have created the greatest photography website in the world and no one is looking at my site because my site is on page 80 on a google search than I am not going to realize the full potential of my site.  I have read research on this topic and one paper said that most people don't get past page one. I also believe that most people give greater credibility to a site that is in the top five of page one. 

      Of course a web site is one of the best ways to show what you can do at a very reasonable, well cheap, price. For example, look at my web site. Suppose I spent a fortune running 2 page ads every day of the week in a national newspaper like USA Today. I still wouldn't give out the same amount of information as my site is doing. I certainly couldn't run cool videos and definitely couldn't make money with Pay Per Click adverts like Adsense or affiliate programs like Amazon.  As long as you network, give out business cards and advertise someone is going to click on your site, but wouldn't you like to get more business because your site is ranked in the top five on a relevant search.

   But what is real advise that will help you and what is smoke and mirrors that will set you back several hundred dollars and do little in return. Later on I will tell you what I consider the three best ways to improve your search ratings. Neither way will cost you a bundle from a seo so called expert. I have enrolled in the below course what is loaded with good information on how to increase traffice to your web site, and hopfully increase business for your company. If you click on the below link you will see that there is a lot of ways to increase traffic to  your web site. Some ways that you would never think, that will increase traffic to your site.

But first let me give you a little history of this site in relation to seo, This site was created in early January. This was the third website I created, so I knew some things about seo at that time. The first site I created was called 'hempictures.com'  It was a site that divided content between a portrait photography business, bed and breakfast workshops, trying to sell my home, a blog about my political views and of course I was trying to sell my novel.( This site has some of the same objectives of the old site, but the way I have fitted these objectives into the new site has changed.)  My reason for doing this was to have multiple reasons for reaching my site via search engines like google or yahoo. As you may have guess this site was a complete failure. But latter on this site proved to be a success with search engines.

   So when I created the site you are looking at I knew how to do some of the things that would help improve my search rankings. Things like putting keywords in my content, putting keywords in headline type and as alt text for my images. I also signed up for photographer directories and tried to create links from the directories. Of course I also linked my two previous sites and three sites I got free from comcast, flickr and One Model Place.

     Keywords are words or phrases search engines like google look for in your website in order to determine how relevant your site is in relation to what someone has typed in a google search.  For example if you are a photographer who wants to run a Photography business in Fort Pierce it would be a good idea to use the underlined words as keywords in the content, especially in the top half of each page of your website.  Keywords are also put in the coded html section of your website, but a program like X site pro make this pretty easy. When you create a page, X site pro has a simple form where you can type in your keywords and other instructions like whether you want links to other pages and where do you want to put the links.

   I wish I could tell you that I was a success and that all the stuff I learned about seo put me in the top five for 'Photographer Fort Pierce'. Nope the first week or two I couldn't find my site on the search rankings. Finally in the third week I reached page 12 in the search rankings. After that I quickly climbed to page 2 and sometimes page 3 of the rankings. This lasted for several months until finally I made it to page 1 in June.

But this isn't the interesting part of my experience. Several months ago I decided not to close my old site and instead linked my old site to my new site. Seo experts say each time I get a link from another site that is relevant to what your site is doing that it will increase your rankings. Well here is the funny part. I don't know how well this increased my rankings, but it sure increased the ranking of my old site. So far my new site hasn't passed my old site in the ranking of Photographer or Photography Fort Pierce but has move ahead in the other categories.

Rankings on 7/28/10(ranking can change, sometimes within minutes.)

Photographer Fort Pierce 161,000 results
Old site: Page 1, rank 6 New site: Page 1, rank 7

Photography Fort Pierce 146,000 results
Old site: Page 1, rank 3 New site: Page 1, rank 4

Mature Photography Fort Pierce 58,000 results
Old site: not listed, New site: Page 1, rank 1,2

Erotic Photography Fort Pierce 14,000 results
Old site: not listed, New site: Page 1, rank 6
note: My page on One Model Place ranked number 3. I find that most gratifying. 

Custom Photography Fort Pierce  73,800 results
Old site: Page 1, rank 8  New site: Page 1, rank 1,2
note: My page on One Model Place ranked 3 and two directories ranked 5 and 6 mentioned my site on their listing. This would be great news except for the fact that people in Fort Pierce looking for a photographer do not type in Custom Photography when making a search.*

*I didn't put in the word 'Custom' as part of my web site name to get better ratings. I used this word to describe my philosophy of doing business. I wanted to make the client a part of the creative process.   I know of no one who is doing what I am doing and maybe this is because my idea is not a good business model. I did put in the word 'Photography' as part of my web site name. Seo experts said this will help improve your search ranking.  It has certainly improved my search ranking when the word 'Photography' is part of the search. Even on an international search on google the search results surprised me.
Mature Photography listed on page 9 out of 4,590,000 results.
Custom Photography listed on page 14 out of 15,400,000 results

For Photographer Fort Pierce until recently the number one ranking, it is now two, belonged to HightowerStaten.com   If you check this site's home page you will not find Photographer or Fort Pierce, two important keywords the so called experts say you have to have, on the home page. Even the word Photography that you see on this page is an image and not type. This is important because search engines can't read images according to the experts. So why is this site ranked so high?

I am going to guess on this one, because I am not a seo expert. On the home page they mention: 'Serving St. Lucie county residents since 1980'. This means that they have had a business for a long time.  I am going to guess that their site has been open for several years.  I believe that the length of time a person has opened a site is a big factor in the ranking. I believe this is the reason my old site is still beating my new site.  Hightower and Staten are also listed on the many directories about Photography and probably have links from some of those directories like I do.

My unofficial conclusion: I do believe that keywords and how you put keywords in your header type can play a role. But to me the biggest factor, at least for local rankings, may be how long has your site been on the internet.  I believe this factor is closely followed by the number of cross links that you have with sites closely connected to Photography. I think this is the chief reason that a lot of directory sites are always listed at the top of the local Photography rankings. The last major factor is having a search term like 'Photography' as part of your web site name.

   If that works for you, hopefully you will write me out a check for several thousand dollars so I could become a so called seo expert.

SEO further update
In late May and early June my site did manage to make it to #1 in the rankings for Photographer Fort Pierce on Google. Howerver on 6/12/11 I discovered that my site had disappeared from the google ranking. Now Google has taken my site from its' search engine. I have no idea why google has done this to me. I expect it is going to take a lot of work to find out what has happen. I am still ranked in Bing and Yahoo, but my ranking is not as good as the one I had on google. To be continued.

SEO update: 7/6/11
My site is back on Google's search engine. How this happened I am totally clueless. For Fort Pierce Photography I am #1 on page one. For Fort Pierce and Photographer I am #2 on page one. The difference may be because my web site title features the word 'photography' not 'photographer'.   

 Postscript: Of course my rankings are based on a local search and therefore may not apply to a national search. For example one of my major keywords - Fort Pierce -  will not get me a first page national listing on google. If you use keywords for a national search ratings things get a little more complicated. You may have to use groups of related keywords known as 'Long tail keywords' to get better rankings. Suggest that you visit the following site   -a well known site for learning about and using keywords.