St. Louis Wedding Photographer

This is the first official post for my SEO for Photographers Series. There are a couple reasons why you should be aware of search engine optimization and optimizing your site. The first reason is that you want visitors to find your site and use your services. You always want visitors to find your site even if you are busy. Optimizing your site will increase the likelihood of the search engines finding all the relevant information on your site. Optimizing a website generally requires at least an understanding of editing HTML. If you do not understand or feel comfortable modifying the source code for your site, you might hire a professional.

In addition to helping search engines find important content on your site, you want to optimize your site because your competitors are probably doing it. If search engines can find relevant information easily and your site is optimized, it will increase the chances of your site ranking well.

One of the biggest problems most photographers face is the limitation created by using an all Flash website (read my previous post about SEO problems caused by Flash). In a separate post, I give some suggestions on ways to address Flash photography sites. It is worth mentioning that there is speculation that Google and some other engines will have the ability to read content embedded in Flash. The problem is that there is really no way that the engines can give content embedded in Flash the same weight as regular content created in HTML or another language that the engines can easily read.

The reason the Flash content won’t receive as much weight as regular content is that it would open the door for a lot of black hat (or unethical) practices to allow savvy individuals to achieve higher rankings than they deserve. Search engines have spent years evolving to prevent users from spamming or using other techniques to obtain high rankings that they don’t deserve.

When you are optimizing your site, it is important to understand where you can expect to receive traffic. Google is by far the biggest search engine in the United States (receiving more than 68% of all searches) but that isn’t the case for all countries. In Russia, a search engine called Yandex receives about 50% of PPC traffic (source: searchmarketingstandard.com). The point is that some engines give different weights to various factors that go into optimizing a site. Also, some engines convert visitors better than others - Yahoo converts people better than Google but google has roughly four times the users.