Tag Archives: search engine optimization

9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging

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fire 150x150 9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging picturesListed below are 9 sure fire tips to improve your photo blogging success. Whether you’re a hard core photo blog publisher along the lines of Eric, Sam or Dave, or just enjoy crafting the occasional post, we all like to steadily improve our offerings and enhance audience size.

These 9 tips cover many topics beyond just photography tips, but are important elements to expanding your photo blogging horizons. With the new year already upon, now is as good a time as any to look for ways to distinguish your presence online.

  • General Knowledge – When it comes to blogging essentials, Darren is in a class by himself. His candid approach and informative posts have helped launch the careers of numerous bloggers. With over 128k daily subscribers and a best selling book, Darren features posts on a wide range of topics every blogger can benefit from reading.

  • Web development – Nettuts+ is an excellent resource for web developers and designers, offering tutorials and articles on technology, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites. Even though some of the topics covered on this site may be a bit advanced for many bloggers, the tutorials are broken down in easy to follow steps. I always look forward to receiving this feed!….Just interested in jazzin’ up your WordPress blog? Here are a few places to start, Hongkitat, Lorelle, and of course, Matt.

  • Inspiration – It happens to all of us, sooner or later, if you continue photo blogging, the time will come when you run out of ideas. What do you do? Why read more photo blogs, of course. Without a doubt, StumbleUpon is my greatest weakness. Be warned, this site is highly addictive! Simply sign up (it’s free), download their toolbar, select your topic preferences, and you’re off and running… Smashing Magazine covers a lot of ground in the graphic design/photography field; always a source for great “Top xx” type features. Also check out photoblogs.org, FFFFound and coolphotoblogs.

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Perhaps the most over-used web phrase ever..however, you do need to know something about this topic to succeed online. If you are just looking for a general overview of SEO, check out this recent article by James. If you’re looking to take your SEO knowledge to the next level, start here.. SEO Book.

  • Photography Lessons – You can gain photographic knowledge from a variety of ways, such as reading tutorials, like DPS and Aaron, watching a professional photographer, like Chase, at work or even invest in private workshops, i.e., Jason, Don, and Jerry. Regardless of the avenue you choose, continuing education is not only important in developing your photography skills, it is a great way to network with other photographers!

  • Monetizing your photo blog – Without going into too much detail, if you are looking to make money with your photo blog, here’s is where to start your research; John, Darren (yes, again), and this single post from Steve

  • Marketing – In a word – Seth

  • Creative Design – In addition to killer content, web design comes in a close second in determining the success or failure of your web venture. To this point, using free WordPress templates alone is not the way to web success. Learn and understand the basics of great web design and implement these elements into your web presence. Three of my favorites? Check out Jacob ,Chad, and Gino.

  • Improve your writing skills – Let’s face it…all photographers think they are great writers and all writers believe they are awesome photographers. Truth be told, most photographers are not great photographers and most writers, well, struggle. Although I do write a lot, I acknowledge my limitations in this field. Looking to improve on your writing skills? Spend some time here…CopyBlogger, Daily Writing Tips, Editor Unleashed, CopyWrite, 10000 words and Writing Forward.


Hope you enjoyed our post and please RT and share socially….

SEO Tips for Photo Bloggers

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How do I increase my photoblog audience?

This is one question I receive quite often and my response is always the same. How much do you know about search engine optimization? I have created this post, not as a SEO guru, but rather a web knowledgeable photographer focused on getting my readers headed in the right direction towards improving your site’s relevance on the web.

Find the Best Keywords
Two of the most common mistakes people new to search engine optimization or SEO make is 1) they pay no attention to the power of keywords or 2) waste time optimizing their site for keywords nobody searches for.

There are several free keyword search tools on the market that can help you with this process. I started out using the free trial at WordTracker.com. This is a great tool for getting your feet wet in the research process.

While doing your keyword research, you will want to keep a spreadsheet or notebook handy to capture your results. When looking for effective keywords, look beyond single words. One of the my favorite strategies is discovering “keyword phrases”, typically containing 3 or 4 words. The reason? The competition for these phrases is much lower and the ability to dominate a specific search is much greater.

Since I specialize in photo blog reviews, I make sure to optimize for this phrase. You can check on all the major search engines and you’ll see we rank very well!

IMPORTANT – Once you define your niche it is important to establish who the big players are within this space. A quick Google search can give you a good idea, however, the more information you have on your competitors the better you are able to develop a effective strategy to compete.

The most effective tool I have found for researching my main competitors is SEO Elite. Learn what keywords your competitors focus on, who they link to, who links to them, PageRanks of specific pages and much more. In the beginning I spent a great deal of time using this program to study other sites, however, today I am more focused on tracking my personal progress…the peaks and valleys. If you’re unsure about your ability to use this tool, let me assure the learning curve is very short. In addition, SEO Elite comes with an eight week money back guarantee.

>>>For more great tips on SEO for bloggers

How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo

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Learn to develop a high ranking website and dramatically grow your Internet traffic. While I admit to reading every blog possible on SEO, I’d like to reveal how I was able to get on the front page of Google and Yahoo in a short period of time.

SEO doesn’t happen overnight. If you think the following information will get you a top ranking in less than 7 days, you can stop reading now. SEO and growing your search engine rankings doesn’t happen over night. However, there are methods you can use to dramatically cut down on the time it takes to get your site noticed.

Defining your target audience. When I first started this blog, my main interest was creating quality content on photo blogs and photography so I could grow an audience of repeat visitors. While I understood that linked to top rated blogs helps greatly for SEO tactics, I also knew from experience that there are many great blogs were lower rating created by people very passionate about photo blogs. By reaching out to this community, I hoped together, we could spread the word about this site. So this is the market I targeted…passionate photographers, regardless of rank, who loved talking about their work and sharing it with others.

Defining your target keywords. We all read a lot about keywords. Without going too far down this dry topic, defining your target keywords is one of the most important things you will need to do to expect any results! What are keywords? Simply put, these are the words your potential audience uses to search topics related to any subject matter. In my case, some of my selected keywords include photo blog reviews, photo blog review, awesome photography blogs, and photography blogs. Listed below are snapshots of just a few of the search engine results I currently experience:

awesome photography blogs google search4 197x300 How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo picturesphoto blog reviews google search2 217x300 How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo picturesThere are many more examples I could provide, but you get the idea. Spending the time to focus on YOUR specific keywords can help tremendously in driving traffic to your site. Linking to other sites or stories is very useful, but search engine traffic is key.

You must ask yourself, what keywords or keyword phrases best define my niche? …and then write them down and start to research how competitive each of your entries are in the marketplace. I admit to being a spreadsheet junkie, but also had a hard time keeping up with all the data. I hated to throw up my hands and acknowledge I needed help…but this is exactly the point which changed my success.

Professional SEO help is very affordable. Over the course of the past few years, I had used several free programs, enjoyed a little success, but hated dealing with trial offers and a limited array of features. As a programmer and web developer, I wanted to think I could create something on my own to keep from spending any money on blogging. This stubbornness held me back for longer than I would like to admit. I finally broke down and realized that I was wasting valuable time on tasks others have already figured out.  Why reinvent the wheel? For less than the cost a SEO would charge for one hour of time, I was able to purchase a full feature SEO program. Looking back (which I hate to do), I wish I had spent the $47 for this program, long before I purchased the stacks of book while looking for the silver bullet to SEO gains.

Conclusion. I love the product, and yet, have only been using it for 5 months on this site. The results speak for themselves. While my results have not reached the levels obtained by others using this program, I understand my niche and can easily state this is the best and only investment I’ve made for blogging SEO software. As stated previously, my rankings did not pop overnight….in my case, it took roughly 2 months to see real results. If you are trully interested in monetizing your site, focus on getting traffic first. The program is a great step in that direction!

Quickly Improve Your Google PageRank

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What is Google PageRank?

Improving your Google PageRank is a sure fire way to lend credibility to your web page rankings. Google PageRank is an exclusive technology which evaluates the popularity of your website pages by a vote between 0 and 10.

How to improve your Google PageRank?

There are several ways webmasters and website publishers have learned to improve their Google PageRank. I have justed started my program for PageRank improvement at ILovePhotoblogs.com and will share some of the techniques I have implemented.

Content is King!

Many people focus too much time trying to figure out how to “work the system”, however, nothing can replacement the value of original quality content. Spend the majority of your time on creating interesting posts. Ask yourself the following questions:

If I were a visitor to this site, did I learn anything new or was the content simply regurgitated and reposted?

Did I find enough value in this site to return?

Title Posts Properly

Proper keyword usage is important, we can all agree on that, but using relevant keywords in the title of your post is THE MOST important places to focus your energies. Often we find ourselves casually crafting our posts, scan for the obvious grammatical errors and proceed to publish. Big mistake! It is vitally important to have targeted keywords relevant to your post in the title and also, to repeat these keywords in the first paragraph of your posting.

I make it a practice to review the ranking of each post for traffic and ranking. It is never too late to revise your post. If you find some of your articles are suffering from poor traffic/ranking, revise and make a note to review at a later date to see if your changes have made an impact.

Use Valid Code

Be sure that your code is valid. Since many bloggers use ready-made blogging platforms and pre-formatted templates, this should not be an issue…UNLESS..you make changes to the code to incorporate added features such as affiliate ads, layout changes, etc. I have messed up more than a few sites, wildly pasting code over top of important tags. The HTML/XHTML for the site should be valid and can be easily checked at a number of sites, such as HTML Validation Resource , and CSS Validation Resource .

Submit Your Original Content to EzineArticles.com

Ezinearticles.com is a site where expert authors & writers are able to post their original content to be featured within the site. Their massive searchable database allows publishers looking for fresh content to find articles they can use within their newsletters. My experience has been nothing but positive in using Ezinearticles; both for a bump in my Google PageRank and the additional traffic is also much appreciated.