If you are a photographer who is active online, chances are you have your own blog, and post new content on a regular basis. Posting is good – content is and will be king well into the future. But posting in the correct way is the only way to go. If you don’t add content in the right way, it will never offer you SEO strategies, and help you gain traction where you need it the most – within Google.
Content is great, and its important to talk directly to the people that visit and read what you have to write on a regular basis. But one of the main reasons to blog is to attract new customers as well. When people are searching through Google – and 31 billion searches occur every month – will they find you with the searches they are performing?
If you want to start growing and attracting more visitors from Google, there are 3 ways to make sure your blog posts are perfect for search engine placement.
Put Your Keywords In Your Post Title And Title Tag
I was on a photography site the other day. It was a blog built by a wedding photographer, and he showcases many weddings per year, along with a variety of engagement and family photographs based around his wedding clientele. He adds a couple of posts per week, and titles them all in the same way:
- John and Mary’s Wedding
- Justin and Kim’s Engagement
- Marc and Sarah’s New Baby
There is one big problem with this method: no other searcher in Google is going to look for a wedding photographer by typing into Google “John and Mary’s Wedding”. So this photographer isn’t gaining any traction by using this title.
By putting keywords into your title, your blog automatically inserts those keywords into the title tags and page name, and gives you an instant boost in SEO. So just by changing tactics, and posting “A Mountain Wedding In Aspen Colorado” instead of “John and Mary’s Wedding” will give you better traction in Google, and a better chance of being found when brand new searchers look for a “wedding photographer in Aspen Colorado”.
Post More Often
The more you post, the more search terms you have the probability of ranking under.
If you photograph one wedding during the month of April, and you create a post “A Mountain Wedding In Aspen Colorado”, you have one chance of penetrating the search engines for terms related to “wedding photography in Aspen Colorado”. But if you post frequently, and create different posts related to those basic key terms, you increase your chances of being found. How do you do that? Even with one wedding, you can find a variety of things to post about.
- Working at the wedding venue
- Working at the reception venue
- Working with local vendors – floral, cake, caterer, etc.
Even with one wedding, you can quickly come up with a dozen or more things to talk about. Which also gives you a dozen or more posts for the month – and a dozen more chances to reach out to potential searchers.
Interlink Your Posts
When you are writing out a post, you don’t have to include all of the details within a post. Instead, refer back to some of your older posts, and hyperlink them together.
This serves two purposes. Google loves interlinking posts, and rewards posts and ranks them higher overall. It also gives your readers a reason to stay on your blog, and click from one post to the next, continuing to read the information you provide.
Interlinking isn’t difficult; it just takes time to perfect. When you write out a post, you’ll write on a specific topic. And chances are you’ll have written on that topic before as well, possibly from a different angle.
Find the post you want to interlink, and then find a way to develop it into your new blog post. As an example, we’re talking quite a bit in here about blogging and content. Yet one of the key reasons to blog is to gain new clients. What if you blog but have no photography clients – what do you do?
See how I’ve written an older post into the above paragraph and hyperlinked over to it? That’s all it takes. Write it in such a way that it motivates people to want to take the next step, and click over to read that post too.
While there are many other SEO strategies out there to help you get ranked higher in Google, by simply using these three over and over again, you’ll quickly start seeing results. While you may not notice a difference with the first few posts, keep at it. Right now I have hundreds of posts on my blog. And because of the amount of content I provide, I can gain rankings in just a few hours on easier keywords. Just keep working at it, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly you start seeing a return on the work you do on your blog.