Below is a question I answered for friend and pro photographer Adam Smith, shoe photographer extraordinarire. I thought I’d share it to help clear up some grey areas about SEO vs. fancy websites.
Minimalist photography sites and SEO are natural enemies of each
other, like mongooses (mongeese? mongi?) and snakes.
If you do it minimally with Flash, you usually have no spiderable text. If you do it
minimally without Flash, you usually have no spiderable text either. Don’t even think about hiding text by making it the same color as the background, the search engines will burn your site at the stake. So that leaves us without our best weapon, but importantly, with other good weapons.
1. Real World
I always recommend this as The Number One SEO Thingy™.
The best SEO is only half on computers; the other half is you talking to people, reminding
them you’re a photographer and to check out your site AND LINK TO IT
from their site. Carry cards and give them out. Talk, listen, hang out,
get numbers, network. You know the drill. This is just a reminder.
2. Be an Authority
Blog about shooting shoes. You know more about it
than 99.9% of humanity. You’re an authority, and the value of that
cannot be overstated. If you look at ANY successful blog, it’s because
the author is an authority on the subject. Turn that authoritarianism into
money by luring peeps to your site with valuable information that right now is sadly locked in
your brain, waiting to get out through your fingers/keyboard.
3. Text on Other Pages
Your photos should be, and are, displayed very
cleanly with no text. That doesn’t mean we can’t have you write a few
paragraphs, or better a few pages, of text with keywords of niches you
want to target like “product photography”, “Seattle”, “fine art
photographer in Seattle” and the like.
4. CPC
Buy clicks to your site from AdWords. Bid $.06 per click. Your
terms will have to be very “nichey”, but you can get cheap traffic. Cap
it at a few dollars a day and it’ll be worth it: don’t pay much and don’t
expect much, but one of those clicks one day could lead to a $1000
job. Buy terms like “Seattle shoe photographer”.
5. WordPress
It just lets you do all this stuff easier. There’s other content management systems out there, I’m just a fan of WordPress.
