Creating beautiful photography and maintaining a happy client base is key for any photographer. however, it is also important to remember the other usages for your photographs online, such as SEO. One of the most successful methods of attracting new traffic and potential clients, is through good content, which when promoted can help increase your new client leads through your website via google or other search engines.
According to our statistics, if you have just 100-500 hits from Google every day, you have a very high chance of receiving potential inquiries from that ratio, however sadly most photographers average between 30-60 hits a day. Over the past years, our clients have became increasingly conscious of the effect that an seo package can achieve and provide in terms of added benefits. As we ourselves slowly migrated from a custom system, working now with wordpress as it rapidly redeveloped and improved itself, we now have decided that its a perfect time to offer a new service for our clients to improve their blogs and portfolio blog sites to home target their chosen keywords for successful seo online.
Every photographer that has a blog, generally has more photographic media than content or any other, though only a selective few see seo as a successful advertising marketing tool worth investing money into. In order to optimize your results, every part of your content requires optimized from your titles, keywords, tags to your images to achieve a high ranked position guaranteed. Once this has been achieved it will allow you to promote your page according to where you would like to target your market. It is also important when doing image optimization to reduce your page loading time.
Images in html (the most common web coding language) are specified by tags (tag img). Among the attributes for search engine optimization are the alt and the title. The alt attribute specifies alternate text for images… in other words, it tells browsers what to show in the place of your image, if for any reason your image does not load. The title attribute is the tooltip which appears upon hovering over the image with your mouse. These attributes allow you to include your website images into many search engines such as yahoo and google.
We have put together 9 important image seo points to help you optimize images for search engines:
1. Alt and Title:
The Alt attribute is a vital key for optimizing images for search engines. Personally I would advise you to install the SEO Friendly Images plugin. The SEO Friendly Images plugin is mostly recommended for those blogs, where images and photos represent a majority of the website’s content, which predominantly the case for photographers. You can download the plugin from the official website (link to download). After you have finished downloading the plugin from the site, or from your plugin manager in wordpress, just install the plugin and go to the Options menu to change the attributes. It is that simple, here is the key:
%title – will show you the post title
%name – will show you the name of image
%category – will show you the name of category.
Another popular plugin option is the “Override default WordPress alt (recommended)”. It means that the plugin will override any empty alt=”" placed by WordPress redactor by default to any image. If the alt is edited (if it has been given a title), the plugin won’t override it. However, if the title is empty, by default the plugin will add a specific title by default which you have set within the settings of the plugin.
2. The File name
The chosen file name should always be relevant. If you have a photo from a wedding in Dallas for example, then the image name should contain the words: “Dallas Wedding Photography”. Instead of underscores (_), use hyphens (-), for your spaces. EG. Not like this: “Dallas_Wedding_Photo”, but rather like this: “Dallas-wedding-photo”. It is pretty easy and very effective for seo.
3. Use headings (signatures)
Next to the image, use headers. They can be on top, at the bottom, left or right.
4. Try to be relevant
The image should match the content subject, and vice versa. Remember, that images will make your users stay longer on your website.
5. Save for Web
Always try to use Adobe Photoshop for image optimization. The best option is to use the “Save for the Web” option, which you can find under the tab “File”. The program will select the best quality and image size for the Internet, however usually blog images are 900×600 pixels, and saved to 72 dpi.
6. Choosing the right format to save your images
Make sure that your images are saved in either of these 3 file formats for google to index:
JPEG – for photos
GIF – for animation
PNG – for logos, icons, etc.
7. HQ Images
It is believed that people tend to pay more attention to the quality images, where you can see the details. So try to keep your images at a high quality.
8. Optimized image hosting
Popular image hosting services such as Flickr or Google Picasa. Work only with a proven and popular web hosting or save images to your hosting if it can withstand a high load and doesn’t slow down your page loading. However, hosting images using a provider such as flickr, help enhance your seo in image searches online.
9. Unique Images
Many experts believe that unique images have a beneficial effect on optimization. They can be branded with watermarks or logos.
Just remember that proper image optimization will guarantee to bring you a significant ncrease in traffic after a short period of time.
I hope this post will help you. If you have any questions regarding your website optimization and promotion, or would like to know more about our new seo services, drop us an email over at FLOSITESSEO.
Until Next Time…