Pro Photography BlogShare Group: SEO Starter

We are thrilled to host Deborah Chetwood of TheTXPhotography today as our Guest Poster. She's going to be doing a series with us from our Photography BlogShare Group about SEO. Without further adieu:

Find Deborah on Facebook and Visit her Blog

Let me start by saying how excited I am for the creation and growth of the Photography BlogShare group.

All of us are partaking in this world of blogging and most all of us are finding out just how hard it is to get our blog noticed by the people we are targeting (AKA Clients!), but with this group we have a chance to help build our own blogs while helping others do the same. We are a community of photogs working together to build each other up. It doesn’t get much better than that! If you haven’t joined the group yet, please go check it out. It really is a wonderful community of photogs.

Today’s topic is all about understanding the basics when it comes to SEO. Our community is full of new bloggers with lots of wonderful questions. And I thought we should all get on the same page. What is this thing called SEO that everyone keeps spouting about?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically a set of actions with the goal of improving visibility on the internet. There are different categories within these actions and this is what we are going to explore.

But before we do, we need to understand in layman terms why SEO is so important. Let’s say you have a photography business and want to reach potential clients in your area. Before the internet, you would place an advertisement in the yellow pages but the placement and size of the AD would be determined by the amount of money you could invest.

Of course there were other methods: mass mailings, promotional campaigns, etc, but for this comparison we will stick with the AD in the yellow pages. Search engines have taken the place of the yellow pages and just like the yellow pages, you have to understand categories and where your business fits within them, IE Keywords. The end user types in specific keywords and a list of potential matches come up in the list. But how is the list regulated?

Why are certain companies (your competition) always in the first two pages and more importantly, why is your page not even showing up?! This is due to SEO. These other companies have stepped through the set of actions required by the major search engines to ensure themselves top placements. (Please note that not all companies utilize all the actions.) So what are those actions and how can you step through them?

Actions for SEO:

Directories
Purchasing Online Advertising
Top Competition
Text Link Brokers
Link Searches
Distinctive Tools & Services
Usurping Competitors' Links
Mechanized Link Building Programs
Article Writing & Submission
Contributions & Charity
Anchor text
Natural Links
Renting Pages from power Sites

Yep, it is a lot and time consuming and is why I thought I should start some articles to step through these actions. Together we can work on our actions and learn about the dos and don’ts of SEO.

I’m sure you are pondering exactly how this group is helping you build your ranking and specifically what actions it relates to, so let’s talk about that. What the group provides: Backlinks. Backlinks are part of the action category: Natural Links and are a huge factor in the SEO equation. This is why it is super important to accept comments on your blog and to comment on other blogs.

Rules to consider:

Be sure you are linking back to your blog when you leave a comment.
Don’t comment as anonymous because it isn’t creating a link for you.
Make sure the blogs you are commenting on have a connection to your targeted community. IE. photography

It is also important to build links outside of comments in your blog, called blogrolls. Commenting alone is not enough for SEO equations, you need dedicated links to and from bloggers within your targeting community. It gives your blog worth which equals higher rankings. And with our group, you have a large photog community set up to share links. How cool is that? But for this to benefit everyone, everyone who participates has to reciprocate by linking as well.

Do note that your blogroll should not exceed 25 links per category because the spiders that crawl the sites could penalize you. This does not mean you are limited to only 25 links. You can have 100s of links but categorize them in a way that limits the count to 25 max. You also don’t have to place them in a blogroll; creating pages within your blog that are devoted to just links works too. It really is up to the end user on how they want to design this, but definitely add it to your to do list because it is an action that you don’t want to bypass.

-- Deborah Chetwood of TheTXPhotography

Deborah is a Children/family photographer, artist with degrees in Studio Art and Art History. Her extensive background includes time as a Network Engineer, Project Management Consultant, and self-proclaimed research addict. She lives in Austin, TX, and is the proud mother to a 5 yr old. She's our "resident mini-expert" of SEO.

Find Deborah on Facebook and Visit her Blog