Website SEO Checklist - Do These Things Today to Optimize Your Website
I see this every day - beautifully created websites that no one can find. Very frustrating, right? Especially as a photographer. Luckily, there are a few simple ways you can improve your website optimization today, without hiring a big agency. And the best part - you will know and apply these tricks as your brand grows and as you add more content to your website.
How to optimize your photography website for better SEO
Some of my favorite ways to optimize my photography website
Image Optimization
The most common mistake I see photographers do is uploading full size high resolution images to their websites. Hello slow websites, right?! Avoid this mistake easily by using photoshop and saving to web or use software like BlogStomp to shrink your photos. Another free and easy way to intelligently downsize photos without losing the quality is tinyjpg.com. I personally use BlogStomp, I love being able to batch process and add my watermark as well as rename files all in one click.
Which takes me to the second part of image optimization - renaming your images. When exported from your camera or Lightroom, images usually have a file name similar to DCS_0234.jpeg or IMG_1234.jpeg depending on your camera. These file names bear no meaning to Google! And we want to use ANY opportunity we can to give Google more info about our content. So you should always rename your image files with your keywords in mind. Example: atlanta-family-photographer.jpg. There are various opinions about dashes between the words, some say they should be underscores. Personally I use dashes, but you can always try and see what works best for you.
And don’t forget about alt tags. More on that in the Photography SEO checklist.
BlogStomp to help with image optimization
2. Page Naming & URLs
The most effective way to tell Google what your page is about is to use the keywords you want to be found under in your page URLs. What is a URL? It’s the unique page address. Every page on your website has a URL.. This is a prime real estate to utilize for keywords use.
If your page is about maternity photography, be very specific with your URL. Instead of www.katyavilchyk.com/maternity, I actually use /atlanta-maternity-photography. It’s still simple to copy and paste or include in an email as a link, but it also gives a lot more info about my page to Google. Including location is your URL is also a good idea!
More about this in the SEO Checklist.
Page URLs help Google understand the content of your page
3. Internal Links
Google likes hierarchy and pages that are easy to find. Internal links do this job amazingly well with site navigation. But I take it one step further and include internal links between different pages of my website and blog anywhere on my website. On the about me page, I basically re-link to all my main content sections: maternity, newborn, family & personal branding photography. I do the same between blog posts (if I blog and maternity session and then a client does a newborn session and I blog it, I try to mention that they also did a maternity session in my newborn post and vise versa, thus connecting the two posts). It also helps with user experience!
More about this in the SEO Checklist.
4. Landing Pages
If you want to focus on a product or service more than just showing it on your Services or Home page, create a dedicated page for it! Landing pages are essentially what a user would “land” on if you were to run an ad and wanted them to have an ad-specific content to see once they click on it. But landing pages do not have to be done just for ads. In fact, I have never run Google AdWords! But I do have several dedicated landing pages, some of which are ever-green, like my personal branding page, and others I bring on and off based on the offer (mini sessions pages).
The beauty of landing pages is that they can be hyper specific to what you are trying to promote without muddying up your main website. They can outrank your home page. And they still take the user to your website! They are like a secret agent working for you 24/7 for free. When you use your landing pages wisely, they can grow your traffic and bring in your target audience by specific topic and ready to buy from you.
More about this in the SEO Checklist.
Landing pages for mini sessions are a great way to target a specific or seasonal topic
5. Page Headings
When creating your page content try to always break it up into easily-scannable bite-size pieces of information. Start each block with headings. The most important ones are the <h1> and <h2> headings / tags. Make your headings repeat your keywords and your page URL words. So for a maternity photography page, for example, my URL is https://katyavilchyk.com/#/atlanta-maternity-photography/, the header is “maternity photography” and the copy contains such keywords as “maternity photography”, “atlanta” etc.
More about this in the SEO Checklist.
What do you think?
Was this helpful to you? Do you think you can implement these today on your website to improve your SEO? DO you have other tips you’d like to share with me? I’d love to learn!
More about Search Engine Optimization here in my SEO Checklist.