Seeking fame & fortune?
If you dream of seeing your name on page one of Google's search results for Salt Lake City wedding photography, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help it come true.
Feeding Google
SmugMug's NiceName feature lets you place the search words that matter most where they count most: in page titles and URLs.
For example, suppose you create a top-level category named Salt Lake City. Under it, you create a gallery named wedding photography. The URL will be:
www.yourdomain.com/Salt-Lake-City/wedding-photography
And the browser's title bar will contain your gallery NiceName.
More gold:
- Power and Pro subscribers can customize their page titles using the Easy Customizer's Browser section, or the Page Title area of your Advanced Customization.
- If you add a gallery description, Google will use about 140 characters of it as its description of the page in the search results. For humans who are considering clicking your link, those words are crucial.
- Image names like wedding-cake.jpg trump IMG2031.jpg.
- Keywords and captions matter, but the more words you add the less weight Google assigns to each. The rookie mistake almost all photographers make is to spam Google with too many.
- Search engines pick up the information in your homepage Bio box.
- In your control panel, on the Settings tab, you'll find a way to set your Homepage Meta Description. Google will pick up the first 140 characters and use it to display a description of your home page in their search results.
Impressing Google
Google is impressed by links to your site from high-credibility sites that are relevant to yours.
Links from your own blog will help (but Twitter and Facebook won't because they have no-follow tags). Links from major figures in your industry will really help.
Google looks closely at the words the linking page uses when they reference you. If you post on photography forums, put a link in your signature to your site with the words Salt Lake City wedding photography.
Google is not impressed with so-called meta keywords.
Google isn't impressed with repeating words in your URL or page title.
Google cannot see unlisted and password-protected galleries.
Check your Site-wide SmugIslands settings in the Settings tab of your Control Panel. Make sure both "Hello World" and "Hello Smuggers" are set to "Yes."
Outside SEO experts familiar with SmugMug
Here's a wonderful SmugMug SEO overview from an independent expert. And for $39, you can download a PDF loaded with SEO wisdom.
We hear good things about tofurious' SEO workshop and SmugSchool's SEO webinars, but we haven't attended so you may want to ask other photographers for references.