Photography is a highly competitive industry, and setting yourself apart from other photographers is one of the best ways to get the advantage when it comes to bringing in clients. One way to really get the edge on other photographers is to have a website that has great SEO – making it more likely to appear when someone searches online for possible photographers.
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Search Engine Optimization
Edit Website Description
Editing the alt-text of your images
Adjusting the social media preview
Enable and use text blocks on your website
Ranking of your Site
Search Engine Optimization
Let’s start with the basics of search engine optimization: what is it, and why is it important?
In short, the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make your website more visible to potential visitors searching online.
In order to understand the best ways to optimize your site for that purpose, you should develop a working knowledge on the basics of how search engines operate: before a search engine lists a website in search results, it needs to discover, crawl and index that website.
Discovery
It makes sense that before a search engine can list your website in its search results, it has to discover that it even exists! This discovery process can be long and drawn out if left to unfold organically and without any intervention. For those using a Custom Domain, a better approach involves a little proactivity on your part: simply submit your website to Google or Bing and let them know you exist! Doing this jumpstarts the process and invites search engines to send web crawlers to scan it.
Crawling
Once your website has been discovered by a search engine, it sends programs called “web crawlers” to scan the website for new and updated pages. Pro tip: these crawlers follow the web of hyperlinks from one web page to another; this is why links to your website from other sites greatly increase the chances of your site being discovered by a search engine.
Indexing
If a search engine has a program crawling your website, that crawler then scans all textual information and indexes what it finds to be relevant. This indexed information is then used by search engines to process search queries. Keep in mind that since web crawlers can only scan text, media content such as videos and images cannot be indexed.
How do they determine what’s relevant? Search engines determine what text is relevant and important based on how an actual visitor viewing a website would process information. For example, someone might read the Title and headers of a page before reading any text-body content. Some text at the start of a paragraph might be interpreted as useful, while other text might be seen as a string of useless keywords not worth looking at. This is why we recommend that your pages have descriptive and relevant text in addition to your images, and that you place that text on the page in a layout that visitors will find useful.
Text is key!
If you haven’t picked up on it already, we’ll state it here: text is perhaps the most important tool for search engine optimization. Search Engines require that your website be filled with useful, well-formulated, and organized text in order to be indexed. You can create an amazing website filled with rich media content and useful interactivity, but without informative text... web crawlers may just determine that your website is not worth indexing.
Regarding website: while a clean and simple site with minimal text can look great from a design perspective, they simply aren’t best for SEO. If SEO is important to you, consider using text blocks, and make sure to display plenty of relevant text on your website.
While text is incredibly important, please note that we do not suggest you overload your website with an excessive amount of pointless text. In fact, doing so may do more harm than good by prompting web crawlers to deem parts of your website useless.
Links are also key!
Hyperlinks are used to usher crawlers to your website, and search engines favor a higher number of hyperlinks to your website from other well known sites (these are known as inbound links or backlinks). So, promoting your work online in an effort to increase inbound links is highly recommended – Reddit, Facebook Groups, posting a link to Twitter, and other promoting on online forums are great places to quickly promote your website for free.
Search Ranking
If you’ve done all you can do to improve SEO (invitation to discover, adding relevant text, hyperlinks and backlinks), and your website is still not listed in search results, it may be because your site is being compared to other websites with similar content. It may be disconcerting, but keep in mind that not only are you trying to earn your spot in those search results, so are many others. If other websites have better SEO (more content, frequent new content, more links, etc), search engines may rank and prioritize those sites higher than yours in search results. For that reason, when working on your website's SEO, keep those other relevant sites in mind as targets that you should meet and surpass with the SEO of your site.
Factors Outside of Your Control
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, with many factors outside of your control. Statistics like number of site visitors, number of links to your site, where these links are originating from, and how long your site has been active with relevant content, all matter, and aren’t determined by you. If you’re not seeing the results you’d like, we encourage you to give it time. Of course, you’re always welcome to Contact us to brainstorm on whether or not there’s anything else that you can do to improve your website’s SEO.
Editing Your Website's SEO
Page Descriptions
Your website Page Title and Description are the main descriptive preview of your pages that potential visitors will see. This is also the description that will be seen when your website shows up in an online search result (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) when a link to that particular page is indexed.
To customize the page Title and Description, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
SEO Tool icon on the left-hand side.
- Click on the Page tab.
- Click on a particular Page from your website to expand it.
Here you'll be able to customize the Title and Description of each page on your website. Keep in mind that your Home page Description and Title will act as your overall website description and title – when your base domain/website URL is shared this is the information that will be seen.
For the Title, a good tip is to create a short but descriptive representation of that page.
For the Description, you may want to provide a more detailed description of what you and that particular page of your website provides. Keep in mind that you want to create a description that potential visitors will respond to. Instead of creating a list of related keywords, write a descriptive paragraph that contains your keywords. Here is an example:
| Mark's Photography | Events and Portraits Experienced, Reliable, and Passionate event and portrait photographer serving Menlo Park, CA and the San Francisco Bay Area. Contact for a quick quote, and to schedule a consultation. |
Once you complete updating your SEO for all the pages you want to update, you can select another page to edit, if needed. And when you're all done making changes you can click on Save Changes.
Alt-Text of Your Images
Alt-texts of images serve a few important purposes: Visibility, Accessibility, SEO.
Sometimes websites may not load completely and the images on the page may not be visible. The alt-text is there to replace the images when the browser is not able to load the actual images. Alt-text is also read aloud by screen readers that provide accessibility to websites for those that experience visual impairment to be able to know what images are on the page.
But in regards to SEO, alt-text help search engines know what images are on the page. When a search engine crawls your website, they are crawling the text of your website, because they can't actually see images and know what the image is. Alt-text is present to tell the search engines what is contained within the images so that they can index the images properly.
To customize the Alt-Text of images on your website pages, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
- Click on the Images tab.
- Click on a particular Page from your website to expand it.
- You will see all of the Blocks on that page that contain images, select a specific Block to expand it.
In the expanded Block you will see all of the images that have been uploaded to that particular Block, along with the Title and Alt-Text for customizing
Sometimes photo editing programs will automatically generate the Alt-text from the filename of the image. However, you can provide a short descriptive alt-text to create a clearer understanding of what the image contains. For example a image of a bride and groom at their wedding may contain the alt-text "bride and groom exchanging vows" to describe what is happening in the image. Keep in mind that the alt-text should be a very basic and short description of the image, the alt-text should not be used to provide longer descriptions of the image.
Once you complete updating your SEO information for all of the pages/blocks you want to update, you can click on Save Changes.
Social Media Preview
Just like the main Pages Titles and Descriptions, you can create a custom Title, Description, and preview image specific for social media for each page. This is the preview of the link that is seen when you post a link on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
To customize the Social Media sharing Title and Description of your pages, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
- Click on the Social Share tab.
- Click on a particular Page from your website to expand it.
Here you'll be able to customize the social media preview Title, Description and image for this page.
Similar to the main Pages Titles and Descriptions, you should create a short but descriptive preview of your page. You can even use the same text from the main Pages description. In addition to the Title and Description, social media will generate a image preview for you website as well and you can change this image using the pencil icon and upload an image from your device.
Once you complete customizing the Social Share information for all the pages you want to update, you can click on Save Changes.
Editing Your Website's SEO In the Website Editor
Website Description
Your website Title and Description are the main descriptive preview of your website that potential visitors will see. This is the description that will be seen when your website shows up in an online search result (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).
To customize the website Title and Description, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
Website editor button on the left.
- Click on the Navigation icon at the top of the left panel of the Editor.
- Click on the vertical ellipsis
next to your website page. Note: you must first select the page you want to edit these options for.
- Choose Site SEO Options from the menu.
In the SEO OPTIONS window that appears, select the Main tab.
Here you'll be able to customize the Website Title and the Website Description.
For your Website Title, a good tip is to create a short but descriptive representation of your website.
For your Website Description, you want to provide a more detailed description of what your and your website provides. Keep in mind that you want to create a description that potential visitors will respond to. Instead of creating a list of keywords related to your website, write a descriptive paragraph that contains your keywords. Here is an example:
| Mark's Photography | Events and Portraits | Menlo Park, CA Experienced, Reliable, and Passionate event and portrait photographer serving Menlo Park, CA and the San Francisco Bay Area. Contact for a quick quote, and to schedule a consultation. |
Once you complete updating your SEO for a particular page, you can select another page to edit, if needed. And when you're all done making changes you can click on Save Changes.
Alt-Text of Your Images
Alt-texts of images serve a few important purposes: Visibility, Accessibility, SEO.
Sometimes websites may not load completely and the images on the page may not be visible. The alt-text is there to replace the images when the browser is not able to load the actual images. Alt-text is also read aloud by screen readers that provide accessibility to websites for those that experience visual impairment to be able to know what images are on the page.
But in regards to SEO, alt-text help search engines know what images are on the page. When a search engine crawls your website, they are crawling the text of your website, because they can't actually see images and know what the image is. Alt-text is present to tell the search engines what is contained within the images so that they can index the images properly.
To customize the image Alt-Texts, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
- Click on the Navigation icon at the top of the left panel of the Editor.
- Click on the vertical ellipsis
- Choose Site SEO Options from the menu.
In the SEO OPTIONS window that appears, select the Images tab.
Here you'll be able to customize the Alt-test of the images that appear on your website page.
Sometimes photo editing programs will automatically generate the Alt-text from the filename of the image. However, you can provide a short descriptive alt-text to create a clearer understanding of what the image contains. For example a image of a bride and groom at their wedding may contain the alt-text "bride and groom exchanging vows" to describe what is happening in the image. Keep in mind that the alt-text should be a very basic and short description of the image, the alt-text should not be used to provide longer descriptions of the image.
Once you complete updating your SEO information for your website, you can click on Save.
Social Media Preview
Just like the main website Title and Description, you can create a custom Title, Description, and preview image specific for social media. This is the preview of the link that is seen when you post your website link on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
To customize the Social Media sharing Title and Description, follow these steps:
- In your Zenfolio account, click on the
- Click on the Navigation icon at the top of the left panel of the Editor.
- Select a page of your website and click on the vertical ellipsis
- Choose Site SEO Options from the menu.
In the SEO OPTIONS window that appears, select the Share tab.
Here you'll be able to customize the social media preview Title, Description and image.
Similar to the main website Title and Description, you should create a short but descriptive preview of your website. You can even use the same text from the main website description. In addition to the Title and Description, social media will generate a image preview for you website as well.
Once you complete updating your SEO information for your website, you can click on Save.
Site Ranking
It is worth reiterating that having a higher Site Ranking is a crucial part of potential visitors seeing your website in their search queries, but much of this is outside of your control.
If you’ve done all you can do to improve SEO, and your website is still not listed in search results, it may be because your site is being compared to other websites with similar content and simply has a lower site ranking. Keep in mind that not only are you trying to earn a top spot in those search results, so are many others.
If other websites have better SEO (more content, frequent new content, more links, etc), search engines may rank and prioritize those sites higher than yours in search results. We recommend that you do all that you can do for search engine optimization, but be patient and recognize that improvements typically come slowly over time.