Seo for photographers 2015 by Klz Marketing Creativo

TABLE of CONTENTS PART I

PART II

4 OVERVIEW 4

Search Engine 101

Why Bother with SEO?

How Does Search Work?

What factors influence SEO?

Common Terminology

How Fast Can I Expect Results?

What You See Isn’t What Others See

PART IV

9 UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE BASICS PART III

Universal Search vs. Image Search

11 PHOTOSHELTER & SEO

PART V

12 12 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR SEO 13

BASIC

1. Make sure your website appears properly in search engine result pages (SERP)

BASIC

2. Use a Mobile-Ready Website

BASIC

3. Drop Your Flash Website

BASIC

4. Create a Free Google My Business Listing

BASIC

5. Link to Yourself

BASIC

6. Publish Content Frequently

INTERMEDIATE

7. Create a Keyword List

INTERMEDIATE

8. Assess the Online Competition

INTERMEDIATE

9. Participate in Social Media

EXPERT

10. Get Others to Link to You

EXPERT

11. Perform a Backlink Analysis

EXPERT

12. Analyze

22 CONCLUSION & SEO RESOURCES

© 2015 PhotoShelter, Inc No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, without the prior written consent of PhotoShelter, Inc. The logos of the companies described are the trademarks of their respective owners. No endorsement is implied. PhotoShelter, Inc. makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation.

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PART I

Intro

SEARCH ENGINE 101 ou probably used a search engine today. Maybe you searched for a camera, or a restaurant, or a DIY video on how to carve a chicken. You might have searched from your phone, tablet or laptop. No matter the search, your experience was the same: You searched, found a set of results, clicked on one of the top results, and were on your way. In the information age, search engines are an invaluable tool for sorting through the morass of data.

The websites that appear on the first page of results for nearly any search aren’t there by chance. In most cases, the website owner worked on their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure that they occupied a top position, and the reason is simple. Empirically, we know that 60-80% of the click traffic goes to the top three search results. And behaviorally, people are more likely to refine a search than to go to page 2 if they don’t find what they’re looking for.

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In other words, having good SEO directly translates into more visitors to your site, which in turn can mean more business. Although word of mouth represents the strongest endorsement of a business, more and more photographers are being found through organic searches. Need a wedding photographer in Bozeman? A photojournalist in Liberia? A corporate photographer in Dallas? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that helps your website rank higher in searches on Google and other major search engines. The better your ranking for specific keywords, the more likely you are to drive traffic to your website, which leads to more potential new business. This guide is designed to familiarize you with the inner workings of search engines and give you a systematic approach to improving your SEO. Although the major search engines have had numerous modifications to their ranking algorithms since we first released this guide in 2009, much of the fundamentals that govern SEO success have remained unchanged. And since SEO is a long term play, it’s important to get started as soon as possible. For the purposes of this guide, we focus mostly on Google, which serves 67.6% of search engine market share. But even though each major search engine has slight differences in the way they determine and display search results, most experts agree that the foundational signals (e.g. links, domain, social) are common.

A search for “oscars” the day after the Academy Awards illustrates Google’s universal search results which incorporates news, video, answer box, and organic search results.

WHY BOTHER WITH SEO? Search engines are helpful to you and me, and they continue to evolve because they make lots of money for companies like Google. Simply stated, they provide page inventory against which ads can be placed. As sophisticated as Google’s machinations were in the late 90s, it was only once they figured out that they could pair an ad for shoes with a search for shoes that they became the juggernaut of the web.

So instead of thinking of SEO as a game created by a maniacal clockmaker, consider the realities of how doubling (or halving) your website traffic would impact your business and livelihood. There is no doubt that the changing algorithms are frustrating, but it’s the price we pay for constant innovation.

But if you remember the early days of the Internet in the mid 90s, search engines are a fickle thing. Without a constant evolution, and without the ability to provide results that meet the expectation of the searcher, search engines fall out of favor with users. Who can remember AltaVista, Dogpile, or even Yahoo!’s search engines?

HOW DOES SEARCH WORK?

Meeting the expectation of the user necessarily means that constant refinements need to be made to search. Google used to only provide text results, but now their universal search incorporates images, video, news, maps and more. The improvements are an effort to placate the searcher so that they don’t go to another search engine, which would significantly impact Google’s revenue.

In 2013, Google reportedly indexed over 30 trillion webpages to try to bring you the best results. Here’s how they do it.

Google web crawlers are pieces of software that scour the Internet for pages to consider including in its index. Google uses a combination of previous crawls, domain registrations, and user supplied sitemaps as a starting point for its crawl. Then it traverses links that it finds on these webpages to increase its knowledge of the Web. It’s important to note that sitemaps don’t affect page ranking, it’s merely a way to let search engines know where content exists on your website.

>> CRAWL:

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All the pages and page data are thrown into a massive Index that is the basis for searching.

>> INDEX:

An algorithm helps determine 1) what the user is searching for, and 2) which pages are relevant to a search. Google’s algorithm consists of over 200 signals or “factors” to help provide a set of results that it believes matches the user’s intent.

>> RANK:

Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm to provide better results. The larger changes get project names, and you might have heard of some of them:

(c. 2011). This change lowered the rank of low quality sites (often referred to as content farms) like About.com in search results.

>> GOOGLE PANDA

(c. 2012). Broken out into 6 releases, Penguin sought to decrease the search rankings of sites that violated the blackhat technique of manipulating the number of links to a page—one of the major algorithmic signals for ranking.

>> GOOGLE PENGUIN

>> GOOGLE HUMMINGBIRD (c. 2013). Hummingbird

was less about ranking and more about understanding the context of a user’s search. Natural language search techniques help Google parse a search query more intelligently and provide better search results.

WHAT FACTORS INFLUENCE SEO? Over 200 signals are believed to influence where your webpage comes up for a particular search. Although the signals fall into broad groups (e.g. content on your website), the large number of signals also means that no one signal is likely to significantly affect your SEO. Search Engine Land created a Periodic Table to help better understand all the different factors.

Source: Search Engine Land

In this table, the factors are divided into two major categories, subdivided into seven subsections: ON-PAGE FACTORS

OFF-PAGE FACTORS

Content HTML Architecture

Links Trust Social Personal

You have the ability to directly influence the on-page factors by the selection of your website tool and the content you create on your website. By contrast, the off-page factors are influenced over time by the links and bonds you help build and cultivate. For example, if you want people to link to your website, you need to have compelling content and as well as a marketing effort that lets people know the content exists. Simply having good on-page factors will not lead to good SEO. You must engage in link building, participate in social media, and publish content frequently to improve your SEO. The on-page factors are things you can change immediately. By contrast, off-page factors take time to build and more time for those factors to be considered by the search engines. THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

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COMMON TERMINOLOGY The world of Search Engine Optimization is filled with acronyms and technical jargon. Here are few common terms you should be familiar with.

The “Search Engine Result Page” is what you see when you search Google, Bing, Yahoo! or other search engines.

>> SERP:

The text results that aren’t denoted by “Ad” in a Google search are referred to as organic search results. You want your website to appear as organic search results on the first SERP because its free, unsolicited traffic to your website.

>> ORGANIC SEARCH:

>> PAGE TITLE: One of many on-page factors influencing SEO. The Page Title is

also the main link in a SERP for a given site.

One of many on-page factors influencing SEO. Since many photography websites don’t have much text, the meta description is very important to provide textual data to search engines.

>> META DESCRIPTION:

The head-and-shoulders icon indicates personalization of search results, aka Search Plus Your World. In this example, the personalized result has the PhotoShelter podcast as the 2nd organic result.

The sitemap is a technical document that can be submitted to Google and other search engines that lists all the webpages on your website. This can be important as it doesn’t require the search engine to “find” all the pages within a site during the crawl phase.

>> SITEMAP:

HOW FAST CAN I EXPECT RESULTS? We’ve seen significant changes reflected in a few weeks, but most SEO experts agree that stabilization of SEO rankings occurs after about 3 months from when the time a change has been made. Still, given that most pages and websites are not optimized, you might be surprised how quickly your website will start to rank for the more niche terms you’re targeting.

WHAT YOU SEE ISN’T WHAT OTHERS SEE For a decade, Google has sought to provide personalized results based on what you search for and where you go on the Web. With the release of Google+, Google started pulling in “social search” results into the personalized results (e.g. friends with Joe McNally on G+? You might find him popping up in more search results).

In the non-personalized result, the 2nd organic result is the PhotoShelter Twitter account.

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Google’s Search Plus Your World, the defaulted mode Google searches under, might give you more pertinent results, but it also makes it difficult to tell what other people see when they execute a search. You can toggle the feature on and off by clicking the “world” icon in the upper right of a search result. Alternately, you can use non-tracking modes like Google Chrome’s “Incognito Window” or Safari’s “Private Window” to get non-personalized results.

THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

PART II

Understanding Google Basics

UNIVERSAL SEARCH VS. IMAGE SEARCH hen you search on Google, the resulting search engine result page (SERP) returns a list of webpages in the Universal Search format. Depending on what you search for, Google tries to present a myriad of different types of information to best meet your expectation. Universal Search results can include: • Answer box • Carousel • News • Maps • Images • Shopping • Ads Here are some examples of these different search result types: ANSWER BOX

If you search for “Ebola” you might get the “Answer Box” at the top of the page. Google sources information for the Answer Box from well-known repositories like Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Widgets, etc, and with the intent of directly answering a question. Some studies suggest that 17% of searches yield an Answer Box. CAROUSEL

If you search for “museums in nyc” you will get a carousel of “answers” from Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is a knowledge base with semantic-search capabilities. In other words, it’s a database of interconnected information that understands natural language.

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MAPS

If you search for the restaurant “Shake Shack” you might get a “Map Pack” of 3-6 addresses plus a Google Map showing you geographically close locations.

Different engineering teams are responsible for these respective search engines, and while there is a lot of overlap in the signals that affect the SEO, success in one doesn’t necessarily equate to success in another. For example, we have observed a correlation between filename and SEO success in Google Image search. When you search for “empire state building,” almost all the top results have an image filename that includes those keywords (e.g. empire-state-building.jpg). However, this isn’t so much the case with universal search.

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IMAGE SEARCH

When you go to images.google.com, you are executing a Google Images search, which returns up to 1,000 thumbnails in an “infinite scroll” (a concept that originated with the search engine Bing.com).

It’s also important to understand that while more and more people are using Google Images to find photos, it usually represents a very small percentage of traffic to photography websites, once again underscoring the value of good on-page text.

THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

PART III

PhotoShelter & SEO

s you’ve learned, good SEO isn’t the result of a single activity, but a culmination of efforts that include everything from your website to your participation in social media. That said, your choice of website provider can help your efforts. This is how PhotoShelter websites help:

PhotoShelter websites are created with the industry-standard HTML5, which means they can be displayed on any web browser.

FLASH FREE:

MOBILE READY: Our responsive websites are optimized for mobile devices, which means they will continue to rank well when users search from their phones and tablets.

Our websites also allow you to custom edit the Page Title, which is generally considered the most important on-page factor. Use this field to fine-tune your keywords.

CUSTOMIZABLE PAGE TITLES:

Many photo websites lack significant textual information that is usually the basis for indexability. PhotoShelter allows you to customize the metadata field which means even webpages with no text can still be seen by search engines.

CUSTOMIZABLE METADATA:

AUTO-EXTRACT IPTC DESCRIPTION: Search engines don’t

read the IPTC captions from your images, but descriptions of images on a webpage help SEO. PhotoShelter archive images automatically extract IPTC Description and insert this information into the image “ALT” attribute, which specifically indicates to search engines what the image depicts.

PhotoShelter automatically creates a sitemap of all your public galleries and images using the sitemaps protocol. We formally submitted sitemaps to Google explicitly, but now list sitemaps in a robots.txt file. This decreases our reliance on 3rd party APIs (e.g. Google’s ever-changing API), and instead makes our site more search-engine friendly to all services. SITEMAP CREATION:

“BUT ONLY A HANDFUL OF MY PAGES AND IMAGES ARE SHOWING UP IN GOOGLE!”

There is a misconception that simply submitting a sitemap to a search engine will result in a full indexing of your site. A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site, but your SEO will determine how many pages are indexed and where they rank. If you haven’t built a large number of backlinks and the images on your site have common keywords, you won’t rank well (or possibly even be indexed). Use social media and blogs to start building your SEO, and your search engine visibility will inevitably rise.

Photoshelter websites are created with the industry-standard HTML5 and can be displayed on any web browser. THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

PART IV

12 Ways to Improve Your SEO

EO success doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen overnight. You need a sustained effort for content building combined with best SEO practices to start appearing on the first results page. But the advantages in doing so are clear: you will generate significantly more organic (aka free) traffic to your website, which could mean a lot more business. Ahead are 12 ways to improve your SEO ranging from basic to expert levels.

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1. MAKE SURE YOUR WEBSITE APPEARS PROPERLY IN SEARCH ENGINE RESULT PAGES (SERP).

This is an example of a website where the photographer either hasn’t populated meta description and page title or the site doesn’t support it. Because there is also no text on the page, Google is forced to index the only text it can find which are the obfuscated file names.

The appearance of your website in a search result can influence whether people click on it or not, as well as affect the indexability of a given page. To check: Search for your name in Google

The page title and meta description are used in the search engine results. Not properly filling this information can lead to unexpected results.

With PhotoShelter, updating the page title and meta description can be done directly in the Site Builder. Google will usually re-crawl and re-index your site within a few weeks.

A search for photographer Amanda Jasnowski accurately pulls up her website, but if you’re not familiar with Jasnowski, it raises a few questions. Is Amanda Jas really Amanda Jasnowski? What are all those weird letters and numbers? Is this a spam/ phishing site?

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2. USE A MOBILE-READY WEBSITE

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More and more people are using search engines on mobile devices (phone and tablets) and the trend line suggests that this will continue for some time. Google loves a good user experience, and when a user searches via a mobile device, Google biases its results toward mobile-friendly websites. In other words, even if you’re #1 for a search term from a desktop, you won’t necessarily be #1 when searching from a phone.

“Responsive” websites optimize page design based on the device that is used to view the content. For example, on the desktop, it’s common to have 2-3 columns of information. On a phone, a single column is preferred. PhotoShelter websites are responsive and mobile-ready. PhotoShelter websites allow you to control many on-page factors affecting SEO including page title and meta description.

You can check your website’s mobile readiness with Google’s MobileFriendly Test.

Your photography website must be mobilefriendly to be competitive and retain visitors.

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3. DROP YOUR FLASH WEBSITE Flash is a proprietary programming language from Adobe that gained popularity at the turn of the millenium for its fancy display capabilities and interactivity, which resonated with many photographers. Nowadays, javascript can provide the same capabilities and more. Although Google has the ability to index Flash code, they recommend that “you use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, and instead use HTML for content and navigation.” Many Flash developers have built “shadow” HTML sites behind the Flash front-ends to improve SEO, but Google frowns upon this type of hackery because it looks like you’re trying to game the search results. And since 2014, Google has been indicating sites using Flash that may not display properly on the browsing device.

4. CREATE A FREE “GOOGLE MY BUSINESS” LISTING A large percentage of searches are geographic-specific, like “new york commercial photographer,” “honolulu wedding photographer,” “belize scuba photos.” When Google returns results that have a geographic component, they often supercede the standard results with the Google Maps “pack.” These are a set of results plotted on a clickable map. How do you get onto the map? Create a free Google My Business listing at https://www.google.com/business/.

Google's indication that a site is using Flash.

Finally, Flash isn’t supported on most mobile devices, which means you’re potentially losing a larger and larger share of your audience.

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5. LINK TO YOURSELF Joining trade groups or community sites is an easy way of linking back to yourself. Many photo trade organizations have profile pages for their members, and from these pages, you can easily link to yourself. Because these trade sites typically have good domain strength and are authoritative within photography, they are great backlinks to have (this includes the PhotoShelter public member directory). Similarly, social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram allow you to insert links to wherever you want.

But not all sites will have a positive impact. For example, medium.com uses a “nofollow” tag, which tells search engines to not give any backlink weight. Writing a post on medium.com and linking back to yourself will not give you any SEO benefit. Secondly, consider writing a blog. Blogs give you a very easy way to self-publish. You control the content and the keywords used to describe your photos, and you can link back to specific images or galleries within your website. This level of specificity is crucial in building overall SEO, because having links to only your homepage will have limited effect in building SEO against a very large corpus of related terms. That said, you need to have content of high quality. Your domain can be penalized by search engines if the content appears spammy, deceptive, etc. There are several schools of thought regarding whether a blog should reside on the same domain or sub-domain as your photography website (e.g. example.com/blog or blog.example.com). Traditionally, the answer was yes because the goal was to build up as much “domain strength” by generating as many pages of content as possible. However, the search engines limit the number of results from a specific domain on a single SERP. Therefore, some SEO experts recommend having content on multiple domains (e.g. exampleblog.com). This also gives you a publishing platform on a separate domain from which you can build good textual content and backlinks.

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6. PUBLISH CONTENT FREQUENTLY It’s very common for photographers to spend significant time assembling the perfect online portfolio on their website and then not pay attention to it for months if not years. But Google will often factor in “freshness” of content in ranking search results. Google biases certain search results using the concept of Quality Deserves Freshness. Have photos of presidential contenders in a gallery from 2012? That probably won’t rank well as we approach the next election. Make sure to regularly add content to your website. Not only does it help to enlarge your online footprint, it also gives you a freshness advantage in the eyes of the search engines.

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7. CREATE A KEYWORD LIST Optimizing your website for specific keywords and phrases shouldn’t be approached willy-nilly. Create a list of keywords and phrases that you want your website to rank for. This list should contain 20-50 words and phrases and should range from the general to the more specific. You should have a combination of “head terms” (phrases of 3 or fewer keywords) and “long tail terms.” For example, let’s say you’re a wedding photographer in Philadelphia. The following words might appear on your list. • philadelphia wedding photographer • philly wedding photographer • wedding photographer in philly • ambler wedding photographer • wedding photographers near temple university • cheap wedding photographers in philly • best philadelphia wedding photographer Using colloquial terms like “philly” and more specific terms like “ambler” (a Philadelphia suburb) is likely to drive more relevant traffic to your website. Having a good mix of long tail terms will also make it 1) easier for you to build SEO on less competitive terms, and 2) drive qualified traffic to your website. Certain terms can imply different intent. For example, “philly wedding photographer price” is more indicative of someone ready to hire a photographer, and thus a more qualified customer than someone who searches for “wedding photography ideas.” Your keyword list not only represents what terms you want to be found for, but also a guess at what terms people will search for to find you. But how do you really know? You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to see approximate search volumes for each term. The Keyword Planner was developed for advertisers who wanted to gauge how much search volume existed for a given term (e.g. plasma tv) before spending money to place an ad.

Google AdWords

We can use the same tool to get the general search volume for a given term. The tool also gives you suggestions for similar phrases that might generate more search volume. Use the tool to sanity check your list. For example, you might have “wedding photographer in philly” on your list, but the tool reveals that “philly wedding photographer” is the higher search volume term. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have “wedding photographer in philly” on your list—after all, SEO isn’t only about winning for specific terms; over time you should dominate for the corpus of terms that is related to your products and services. The tool allows you to refine your list by adding a few variations or removing lower volume terms. Once you’ve created your keyword list, use that list to inform any copy you write on your website or blog. For example, your homepage title might be “Philadelphia Wedding Photographer,” and your “About” page might begin “I am a wedding photographer based in Philadelphia and serving suburbs like Ambler.” The keyword list is an organizational tool that will help you focus your SEO text efforts.

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8. ASSESS THE ONLINE COMPETITION

9. PARTICIPATE IN SOCIAL MEDIA

If you are a youth sports photographer, then you’re probably keenly aware of who your competition is because you probably stand next to them on the sidelines each week. You might be surprised to find that your online competition is a completely different set of people. Search for each term on your keyword list in Google, and take note of who is coming up in the top ten results. Are you surprised? There are probably a number of names you’ve never even heard of. But in many ways, these people are the more crucial competition because of the way people search for information.

Every year, the braniacs at MOZ (one of the leading resources for SEO) survey the top SEO experts to assess what factors are driving SEO. Of all the many signals that drive SEO, social media continues to play a crucial role. When you think about the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that the search engines are looking at these services as a barometer of what is important and influential on the Web.

The list of results for your keyword list can help you gauge the competitiveness of your niche and give you a quantitative guide to displacing them in the future.

Surf photographer Zak Noyle maintains an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter which all link back to his website, where he sells photos and merchandise.

It’s imperative for photographers to participate in social media, not only for the obvious marketing reasons (e.g. their customers are hanging out on these sites, and therefore go to where your customers are), but also because the search engines are keying into these signals, which affects search engine results. Google+ and Facebook are recommended, but a recent deal between Google and Twitter suggests that Twitter might have increasing influence in the future. You can even use YouTube to influence local search results by geotagging and embedding the video in your Google My Business listing. THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

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10. GET OTHERS TO LINK TO YOU

11. PERFORM A BACKLINK ANALYSIS

The best way to get others to link to you is to shoot something interesting, then use your PR skills to let other sites know about it. Sites like PetaPixel, FeatureShoot, the LENS blog, and the PhotoShelter blog feature photographer’s work regularly and this is a great way to build links. Plus, when your work is featured on a popular site, it inevitably creates a cascade of links from other sites.

Creating backlinks (links from other websites to your website) is of crucial importance to good SEO. It’s also often a very easy way to understand how competitive your competition really is. In order to understand the feasibility of displacing our online competition, we can use a backlink analysis tool like Majestic.

Controversial, topical, or humorous articles can generate strong backlink traffic. And although “linkbait” has a negative connotation, compelling topics can generate significant clicks whether it’s a review of the newest camera or a set of aerial photos over New York City.

James Estrin’s profile of Bangladeshi photographer Shehab Uddin included a backlink from the powerful nytimes.com domain to shehabuddin.com

From your list of online competition, simply search for their domain on Majestic, and you can see unique backlinks and unique domains. Generally, the more backlinks from the more diverse domains it has, the harder it will be to displace. The backlink analysis helps you determine whether you can feasibly displace the competition. If they have 1000 backlinks, it’s probably unlikely, but if they have 50, a concerted effort can clearly help you move ahead in the rankings. Sheer number of links isn’t the only barometer. Look at the number and quality of unique domains as well. If you have a low number of links and poor SEO, a single link from nytimes.com could give you a significant boost.

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12. ANALYZE Before you embark on heavy SEO activity, you may want to put some benchmarks in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Options here can be simple—like doing searches to see where you rank today vs. after you apply our tactics. Or they can be more elaborate, like employing Google Analytics to gauge your progress more analytically. Here are some metrics to track: • Number of visitors (total): From Google Analytics, view the Dashboard for total traffic. If you have a PhotoShelter website, this can be viewed right from your Member Homepage. • Number of visitors via search: From Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources ----> Search” • Number of keywords driving search traffic: From Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources ----> Search ----> Organic” • Number of indexed pages: From google.com, type “site:[your domain name]” • Number of indexed images: From images.google.com, type “site:[your domain name]” • Number of backlinks: From majesticseo.com, type your domain name into the query box. Take note of the number of backlinks and domains. Google Webmaster Tools offers a different set of reports that can help you analyze your SEO efforts, including Search Queries, which shows the average position of keywords sending traffic to your site.

THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

PART V

Conclusion & SEO Resources

lthough the process of building good SEO can often seem mundane and technical, the benefits are tangible and measurable. Building a large online footprint along with strong SEO can generate free, unsolicited traffic. SEO is a cornerstone of many online marketing efforts, and photographers who persevere can more easily build their online (and offline) audiences.

SEO RESOURCES Some people devote their professional lives to Search Engine Optimization (thankfully!). Here are some of our favorite resources if you want to delve deeper: • Google publishes a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide • MOZ provides a Beginner’s Guide to SEO with a technical explanation on the subtleties of SEO. • Search Engine Land provides daily coverage of SEO-related news. • The Official Google Webmaster Central blog publishes up-to-date changes from the search team • Majestic and ahrefs are free backlink analysis services • HubSpot’s Marketing Grader combines SEO with other inbound marketing factors to generate an easy-tounderstand grade for your website • Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are indispensable for analyzing your SEO progress • Certified PhotoShelter Consultant Alex Vita published an SEO Guide for Photographers • Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool

THE SEO GUIDE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

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