Web site optimisation for Photographers and Artists

There have been a number of instances recently where I have looked at improving the number of visitors to very visual sites - typically for an Artist or Photographer. I'm lucky enough to have a few good friends that are really excellent photographers, so its a personal interest of mine to make sure they do well!

However there always seems to be the same essential mismatch between what the photographer / artist does, and the requirements of good search engine marketing.

Lets start with their site. Typically this has been made by a designer - a really funky designer who the artist thinks is going to portray their really delightful works of art in the most favourable and appropriate light. As they would. However the first mistake is right there, as the web designer uses Flash to display the images - Flash being a bit of a search marketing No-No before you go any further.

Next the front page of the site may well be a splash page - "click here to enter", meaning that the most important page of the site contains no words at all.

And thirdly the sparse-yet-beautiful designer layout may omit one important thing from the entire web site - you've guessed it: words.

So why would our visual artist require words on their web site, when their images are quite beautiful enough to do the talking?

Well this brings us on to search engine marketing, and the one thing that search engines can actually read - words.

So the artists site is essentially invisible. No words - no search visitors. If I were optimising the site I might be looking to have pages optimised for phrases like "Cornish alternative Art", or "London Magazine photographer", or one of the phrases that people are actually searching for. Once this is done properly the web site will start to attract significant visitor numbers - yes you've guessed it - the people who are actually looking for the "Alternative Artist in Cornwall", or the "London Magazine Photographer".

Instead the site is only visible for the few words it contains - which might be "JohnSmithPhotographer.com", or something similarly unlikely to attract any searchers who didn't already know the photographer any way.

So what strategies could be put in place to make this image-rich site into one that is actually capable of attracting visitors through search, who want what my friend does, but don't know him yet.

(Remember with most sites 60% - 95% of all new visitors will come through search)

Let's list a few....
1. The site needs some words. Its no point putting them on the flash pages as they won't really count there, and every time you change them it will cost a fortune to pay the designer. You need words you can add and change, and the best way to do that is with a blog. The blog can be added within the same domain (like this one for example), but be completely separate from the structure of the Flash site. Each can link to the other, and the blog will have regular posts designed not only to use a variety of texts and pictures to inform the visitor what it is that my artist friend is all about, but also to attract the search engines for those target phrases we listed earlier: "Magazine Photographer in London", or "Alternative Artist in Cornwall".

2. So over time the blog will begin to make up the dearth of words on the site, and give the search engines something to get their teeth into. Luckily almost all photographers and artist sites make exactly the same mistakes, so my artist friend is already starting to get an edge over their competitors' web sites. You just need to keep blogging those words (and images of course) - "here are the latest photos from the shoot I did of the new BMW XYZ 123" etc.

3. However to rank highly for competitive phrases ("london photographer" returns 4.8 million results on google.co.uk today for example) the site will also need some links pointing to it. These links tell search engines that the site is considered important, and to rank it more highly. Normally we get these links from other texty web sites, and the content of those texty web sites should be relevant to ours: kodak.com would be a great place for my photographer to get a link from, for example. So we have to write more words, and post them elsewhere on the web. Press releases, directory listings, articles etc are all popular ways of achieving this. But what about the images, mu artist friend squirms?

4. Well you can get links with images, and it relies on an extent to giving some of them away, or giving them away a little bit. What you do it make a low resolution version of your piece of art, or photograph, and make that available on the web. You can do this via:

- Google Image search. Using "Google Webmaster Tools" you just tell Google that its OK to index the images on your site (make sure you really do own the copyright on them before you even put them on the site of course). Then you make sure every image has a really descriptive alt and title tags to make it clear what they are about, and Google will list them all in images.

- Flickr is another place to post some of your images, and each one of these too can contain a link back to your site.

- Panoramio is a Google property that allows you to post images with high quality back links to your site, and it has the added advantage of an integration with Google Maps, so you can locate exactly where the image was taken, painted, or what it represents. Again more good links back to your site.

- Scribd is another site where you can post all types of documents, images included, or perhaps a PDF containing your images, as well as a description of what you are all about (and containing your main keywords), with a link back to your site.

Other sites: There are a pile of other places where you can list your images and other graphical works, while they contribute to the search rankings of your site. Remember however that people can steal them - so you may not want to use everything you've ever produced in this way. You can water mark images, however making them that much less attractive to view may not help you too much. Remember that you are only ever putting a low resolution version on the web, so people will at worst be able to use them on their mobile phone's screen saver, or perhaps their web site. If they want a good quality version, they still have to come to you.

Remember also that you need words in your links to your site, just like you need them on your site. So it really pays to have a lot of links that say "Alternative Art Cornwall" or "London Photographer" in the anchor text, to make it perfectly clear that is what the link is about.

At the end of the day you may be perfectly happy to use your web site as a kind of portfolio for people who already know you to look at your word, and if that is the case then your Flash site will do just fine without any further help.

But if you want the site to bring you new customers that don't already know you, particularly in these difficult economic times, then you should consider doing some of the things listed here: and you need WORDS!

Guests at the Internet Marketing Course

The internet marketing course went well again yesterday, with the usual interesting selection of businesses coming through to understand how to do better on the web. There were a coupld of good local designers there, so I had to be carefull what I said about the effect of too many images and Flash on the Search engine optimisation of a web site! A lynching by designers at the morning coffee break was narrowly avoided.

An additional bonus was that we had a number of old friends in the room, which obviously makes for a pleasant environment for me at the front.

Speakers in addition to Mike Kevern and myself were: Roger from the 12 Volt shop, who talked about the main lessons learned from building up his eCommerce business over the last year. Penny Paddle from Follett Stock gave the module about the legal implications and requirements of trading on-line, and Belinda Waldock from Business Link came in during the afternoon to talk about additional support available to businesses and internet entrepreneurs in Cornwall.

At the end of the day we had the political visitation, from MP Mark Prisk (Shadow Minister for Corwall no less), and Sarah Newton (the local conservative PPC - Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Truro and Falmouth). So the training room reverted to conference format in 10 minutes flat, tea and coffee were served, and we took the opportunity to talk politics. We were impressed by the ability of the political types to have a proper little chat with everyone in the room individually - clearly there is a lot of work into being elected to Parliament, but its always good to meet people that have done that leg-work and made the effort, and to find out a bit more of what they are about.

Please note that although this might appear to be a party political blog post I am strictly neutral, and having Twittered with Charlotte MacKenzie (Labour PPC) and a brother (Arthur Graves) who is a Camden Councillor (Lib Dem), Sarah Newton and I have decided to ensure balance by arguing vociferously via the social networks once we get her to start tweeting!

Forgive me for going a little "Hello" magazine on you now, with a few shots of our trainees and the Follett Stock crew chatting with Mark, Sarah and others.

David Tandy (FS), Martin Pearse (FS), Sarah Newton(PPC), NeilCaddy (JMC) and Chris Lingard (FS)
















Iona and Charlotte, recovering after the Internet Marketing Course.












Lucy Morgan and Kathryn Worlock from Follett Stock, and Peter Channon from Over Cornwall.













Belinda from Business Link and Richard Scrase from Follett Stock.













Conveyancer Terri from Follett Stock with Mark Prisk MP - could they be discussing the property market?













Shaun our Cameraman still apparently cheerful afer a long day.













So a final note of thanks to everyone involved on the day particularly our hosts Follett Stock, and looking forward to the next events that we are currently scheduling for April.

Shadow Minister to meet Cornish Internet Entrepreneurs

An Exciting development for our Internet Marketing Course this Thursday March 12th, is that the Shadow Minster for Cornwall Rt Hon Mark Prisk MP is going to use it as an opportunity to meet Cornish business people, as part of his brief to be the voice for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Mark's visit will take place at the end of the day once the course work is complete, and I'm sure our trainees will be delighted to relax at the end of the day and exchange views with one of Cornwall's senior politicians. Mr Prisk was born in Redruth and went to Truro School, though was elected to Parliament as Conservative MP for Hertford and Stortford in 2001.

Internet Entrepreneurs:
The businesses attending the course on the day are among Cornwall's most go-ahead businesses, with their commitment to making their businesses competitive on the Internet a real sign that they have what it takes to prosper in the information age. As you may know the world of the net makes it possible for a small business to compete world wide against the big boys - as long as they are smart about how they use the net, and are prepared to do the leg work that is required to make their site successful!

Giving these businesses a chance to meet policy makers is a real reward for their efforts, and we hope also rewarding for Mr. Prisk as he works to engage with local people and businesses.

Visitors:
On the day we have businesses in attendance including designers, marketers, those in the tourism industry, marine sector, artists, entrepreneurs, as well as representatives of Follett Stock Solicitors, Digital Peninsula Network and Business Link.

The course partnership:
We have been able to build up a partnership we're proud of in this course, having started with Mike Kevern and ourselves, we then were please to get Follett Stock involved to provide the legal content of the course, and later moved the course into their own conference room in Truro. This year DPN have joined the crew and also had a huge positive impact, by making fully funded places available to Cornish businesses, which has greatly broadened the reach of the course to help more SMEs in the area.

Last week I delivered the content to 30 of DPN's own trainees, a lovely group who seemed really excited about the opportunities that this information opens up for them.

Follow up Course:
We're also offering a new follow-up course to those who have done the day - learned the theory - and now want our additional support to really put the theory into practice on their web sites. The follow up will be called the "Kick Start" day ( I am after all a biker at heart), and will be available to our previous trainees starting this April.

But for now we are concentrating on the course this Thursday, the opportunity for our trainees to meet with Mr Prisk, as well as working increasingly closely with Follett Stock, DPN and Business Link to make the course available to more Cornish businesses.

Additional Information:
Here is a link to our press release about Mr Prisk's visit.
The web site of Mark Prisk MP.
Here link to Digital Peninsula Network.
Here to Follett Stock Solicitors.
Here to Butterfly Business Development (Mike Kevern).

Please note that this week's course is full, but that we are keeping a waiting list for those who might want their names down for future courses.

Rather humbled - so unlike me!

Well I'm back from a long and rather exhausting day presenting an Internet Marketing Course to a fantastic bunch of Cornish businesses people; a course promoted by DPN the Digital Peninsula Network.

The array of people and businesses was staggering, with hotels, eCommerce sites, event producers, a hotel for special needs folks, a great designer friend of ours, architects, tourism operators, artists - heck I could go on.

Herculean Efforts
As usual I'm struck with the variety of people that come along, and the near herculean efforts that many of them have made or are making to get their Internet business or company web sites off the ground. Sometimes a massive range of efforts that are broadly along the right lines, but with important minor omissions, or just not sticking with it in a long enough term to yet reap the rewards.

It is rather humbling (remarkable you may say!) that these people choose to listen to yours truly going on about the Internet, but its clear that many of them can see that the net represents their biggest opportunity to make their businesses fly, and even or especially in these troubled times, they're right.

Bad News!
I sometimes feel like the bearer of bad news however, telling people the amount of work that will be involved in getting their sites and web businesses up to the standard, level of traffic and sales that they aspire to. Its like any business - you put in lots of work up front, and then if you did it right you should reap the rewards later.

Some of course are very well down the track towards a successful on-line business, to the point that I have to suggest they come up to the front! Others are very new to it and not especially technical, so one of the major challenges for me on these days is to pitch the content at a level where the former are not bored, and the latter are not switched off for ever.

Today was interesting from another aspect, as the number of people booked by DPN was considerably larger than we normally take, and with no tables I could not put name labels anywhere, so I have to apologise to everybody for getting their names wrong for most of the day.

Slapstick
There was a bit of a comedy scene in the morning, when the projector at the hotel had an internal disagreement with the mouse of my Laptop, meaning that the course notes started scrolling themselves through uncontrollably when I was showing something on a particular slide. Who would work with computers - I wonder if they are in the same category as children and animals yet?

The real challenge now is for the people on the day, armed with the mountain of information that they have now gathered to go away and start putting it into practice on their web sites...... Consistently.

So I would just refocus on the absolute core concepts:
1. Research Keywords so you know what people are really looking for.
2. Write lots of great content and put it on your site.
3. Get links to it when you can.
4. Get Analytics and Webmaster tools on it so you start to collect a history of results.
5. Once your traffic is up then lets look again at email marketing and an opt-in to enhance the relationship-building and conversion aspects of the site.

That's it really, not sure why I talked all day, I know Mike keeps telling me to keep it short but that's ridiculous! But of you're not especially technical and just want to make progress, focus on that and you'll not be far wrong.

I should add at this point that the link building and blogging "kick start" day will be available in a day or two, and all those who have previously been on the course will be welcome to attend, and work with us to put into practice the theories they have learned on the course. This will be practical day of working on your sites, so I'll notify you as soon as the date is available.

Thanks to all those great Cornish businesses for taking the time to attend today, and all the best with your on-line endevaours. Thanks to the DPN for putting the event on, and to the Crossroads Hotel for a friendly reception and a pleasant lunch. If you were on the course please feel free to mail me with any further questions, and the course notes eBook will be coming out to you soon.

Would you like some SEO with that?

Its one of the most common questions for an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) business, and it goes something like "our budget is pretty tight, could we just do a little bit please?"

While its always tempting to think that you might make some progress in a little time, and possibly tempting for some SEOs to take all those "little bits" and make a living from it, the reality is that good SEO is a campaign, not a task.

Let me justify myself a little.

Broadly speaking in SEO you do very few things.

1. You build more pages.
2. Fill them with words that people are actually looking for.
3. Then you place lots of links to those pages.

That's about what the entire industry does, and it works well. (go on someone, tell me "There's more to it than that!"

Some talk a big grand pitch about "strategies" to command higher fees, and some just tinker with your web page a little, but the real activity boils down to that.

So you select some keywords (guess them in many cases) write some pages, and then do a bit of posting to directories, articles, social sites or whatever to show search engines that those pages are more important.

After a while the search engine crawlers come a long and follow the links, re-index your site, and if your number of incoming links has grown from let's say 5 (from your web designer and your Mum) to about 15, and the number of pages on your site has grown from - 12 to 15 perhaps?

(Don't buy loads of links from a mass "submitter" by the way - just wanted to get that in quickly).

The results in terms of search rankings from the above activity will be limited, partly because the search engines haven't yet picked up many of the links you set up, and partly because it wasn't very much anyway.

So let's say next month you do the same again - and by this time also Google has picked up a few of the links you did the month before, so you get a couple more pages done and a couple more links. The chances are that the difference in your web site's traffic is still negligible.

Now here we need to look at the level of your expectations. For example if we wanted to rank top for "barriper bed and breakfast". This would be pretty easy, as there are few / no listings for it, depending on how you search.

But let's say you're a bit more ambitious and you want a Page 1 ranking for "Cornwall Hotel". Against 362,000 competing web pages you're not going to get there for a while. (One important point here is actually to work on a wide basket of phrases, not just fixating on one).

So lets look at "cornwall hotel". The top site today is called cornwall-online.co.uk, and it has a Google Page Rank of 5, is a well established site, 179 incoming links according to Google, 7,065 according to Yahoo (why the massive discrepancy? - totally different measuring systems in this case, and only a cursory check by me). Even the 10th site (last on Page 1) has done some proper work to get where it is.

So we come back to the basic equation, what is the amount of work (or money) you are prepared to put into ranking, and what is your level of expectations. Go and see how many sites there are in Google for your key phrases, and then evaluate how much effort you can commit.

For the Cornish micro-business prepared to invest £150 in "a little bit of SEO",
1. Is this the first day's SEO of many?
2. If your budget is that limited are you prepared to learn what it takes to do the work itself, and then commit sufficent time on a consistent basis to get there.

If neither of these is the case then the chances are that your £150 will make no appreciable difference to your web site, and you would be better sered to put an add in the local paper.

Here's a couple of posts by people considerably more lucid than me which also explain the process of a good SEO compaign.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3632743
http://ezinearticles.com/?Reasons-Why-it-Takes-Time-For-Your-SEO-Campaign-to-Take-Effect&id=1896537

Note also an SEO company might take your £150, in the hope that you will later realise you need to do more work, by which time they will have "locked you it".

There was actually a great talk this week in Falmouth by the owner of Classic Cornish Cottages, a great site that after years of work is highly successful. They are really doing everything right, and it was great to see a Cornish company doing so well. But they have a full time team of 4 programmers, the CEO and an AdWords budget that would make your eyes water, so they did the graft the right way, and now are reaping the rewards.

But please don't waste your money on a "Little bit of SEO". With all the buzz and hype going on about SEO and social networking its tempting to think its a Panacea, and that as soon as you get involved the rewards will come. However its like any other business, you have to put in the graft up front, and the rewards come later.

I'm sure that £150 was hard to earn, so its best to understand the amount of work involved before committing to spending it.