Search engine optimisation and promotion
Now you have your website, you'll want people to visit it! This article will help you on your first steps to getting a steady and hopefully good stream of visitors into your Photium website.
Search engines are one of the best ways to get people to visit your website, they're free to appear in and people searching for words relevant to your website will find it, this is much more targeted than advertising in your local paper where only maybe 10% of readers may actually be interested in your services.
Search engines work on the principal of keywords, matching the keywords people search for, to the words on websites such as yours. It's vital that you have the right wording on your website, we'll explain more about this later.
Steps to improving Search Engine Traffic
1. Setup your Meta Tags
The first thing you should do is assess what the main services or specialties you are wanting to promote through your website. For example if you are a wedding photographer, your keywords would be wedding, photographer and possibly your location London.
When you've decided on say thirty keywords that are relevant, you're ready to setup your meta tags. First log into your administration area and select the Search Engine Optimisation link.
The three boxes you will see are explained below:
Home Page Title
This is the most important, as it defines what your whole site is about and is most commonly used by search engines.
When entering your home page title, it is vital to keep it short and relevant. You should select only about five of your most important keywords to enter here. Put the most important ones first, e.g. Wedding Photograper in London - John Doe would probably rank better for someone searching for London wedding photographer than John Doe - A excellent and low cost photographer specialising in wedding photography throughout the London area. This is because the second Home Page title has too many non relevant keywords in it.
Meta Description and Meta Keywords
These are both less important than the Home Page Title, as search engines tend to place less importance on them for determining rankings.
Meta Description
For the Meta Description, this should simply be a description of your services and your website. Some search engines display this description under your website title when it is listed on search engine results pages, so it should make the reader want to visit your website. You will need to use complete sentences and proper grammar and punctuation. As a general rule, try to keep this to around 250 characters or less (Maximum is 300 characters).
An example of a Meta Description:
John Doe, a Wedding Photographer for the last ten years, serves the London area and offers an all-in-one, competetively priced package. Why not consider him for your wedding? Discover details of the excellent service offered, testimonials, examples of his work and methods of contacting him.
Meta Keywords
The Meta Keywords tag carries very little weight in today's search engines. However, the list of relevant keywords you came up with earlier will be useful later as well as being entered here.
To enter your keywords, place the most important ones first and seperate them with commas. Try not to repeat any one keyword more than three times.
For example:
OK
london wedding photographer, wedding photography, wedding, photographers, professional, london area etc.
Bad
london wedding photographer, wedding photographer, professional wedding photographer, london area wedding photographer etc. (This is bad because the keywords wedding photographer are repeated four times.)
2. On Page Copy
Also of great importance is the copy you have on the pages on your website. Whereas the meta tags weren't visible to your visitors, the on page copy will be. Key things to remember when writing copy for your website pages are:
a) Don't try and spam or hide keywords, it looks bad to visitors and search engines can penalise you.
b) Keep things readable and interesting, you should be writing for the reader not the search engines.
c) It is good to incorporate words from your keyword list and use them several times where relevant, but bear point b in mind.
3. Page Titles
When adding custom pages or news stories to your website, the pages will be picked up by search engines and can bring in extra visitors to your site. Try to keep the titles of these pages descriptive of what is contained within. For example, if you added a news story about your latest wedding photography deals, don't use the title Latest deals, use something like Latest wedding photography deals. Then someone searching for wedding photography deals might find your page.
4. Incoming Links
Perhaps most important in making your website appear high on the search engines are incoming links. These signify to search engines that people place importance on your website and they will rank it higher accordingly. As well as being good for search engine traffic, links will of course bring you more visitors themselves as people will click out of curiosity to see your site.
A few examples of places to get incoming links are:
a) On any photographic forums you visit. You can mention you have a new site and post a link to it, or include it in your signature when posting messages.
b) Ask friends with websites if they'll link to your site, you can always say you'll link back to them via your links page.
c) If for example, you're a wedding photographer, you could find directories of wedding photographers and submit your site to them. When using directories in this way, it's best if you can always find relevant ones, as they will be more use for your site than irrelevant ones, obvious maybe, but often forgotten.
But bear in mind when getting links that nobody likes a spammer, so be careful how you promote your site when looking for links.
Final note
We've tried here to give you a good head start in optimising your Photium website for search engines. Please note however that getting into search engines is not easy and it will certainly take time, usually months not weeks, before your website will start appearing on search engines.
