St. Louis Wedding Photographer

There are many things that photographers do when building their website or contracting someone to build it for them.

One of the most common mistakes with the photography market is Flash. Probably more than 50% of photography sites are built using flash and most photographers/studio owners don’t know the implications of sites that are built using only Flash. Read one of my previous articles to learn about ways to make your Flash site more search engine friendly.

Besides building a site entirely in Flash, embedding important content like text in Flash or images can hinder search engines’ ability to read that content. By writing your important content in HTML, it makes it easier for the engines to read and index it.

One other common problem with photography sites is the lack of content. Some photographers build sites with almost only images (galleries) and no relevant content. Providing useful content about your services, studio/location, and history helps inform visitors and engines.

When you are developing content it is important to remember that search engines want to not only find content that is relevant and fresh but that content needs to be original. Copying content from other sites can cause search engines to filter out those pages on your site from their ranking pages. Along the same lines, when another site copies your content, it can lead to problems, especially if the engines think the other site has more authority or if the engines think they deserve credit for that content. You can check to see if your content appears on other sites by querying a sentence or part of a sentence in Google or Yahoo. You can also use Copyscape – a tool to check for duplicate content. You just enter a URL from a page on your site and it will search and return sites that duplicate portions of that content.

One of the last problems common to photography sites is the use of images for navigation that don’t use alt or title tags. There are a few ways to make image based navigation more search engine friendly. Using an alt tag is helpful but if you are just using a fancy font, you could check out Flir – this is a great image replacement tool that is very flexible. It displays your text in a fancy font but delivers text versions of that image to the search engines. If you don’t want to use either of these options, another good suggestion is to put text based navigation in your footer. This will provide the engines with another set of descriptive links.

In my next post I’ll discuss how to implement a WordPress blog on your site.